Forgetfulness and Dying to Self

Living out the Christian life requires dying to self. This is a recurring and primary theme in the New Testament. For many earnest believers it is also a theme which causes some puzzlement. Just how, exactly, do we die to self? What part of ourselves are we dying to? Does this mean that we are to somehow annihilate any consciousness of our own existence, as some Eastern religions appear to teach? Should we hate ourselves in order to die to ourselves? The entire concept seems a bit strange to our natural eyes and can even be interpreted in such a way as to inspire great fear, fear of what this “dying” means and fear of what may happen to us if we can’t accomplish it. It is, after all, a divine mandate. Without dying to self the Scriptures indicate we cannot truly follow Christ.

At least part of the answer to this problem can perhaps be found in something C.S. Lewis once wrote. He said that our best spiritual moments came when we forgot about ourselves in the contemplation of God. In other words Lewis did not so much counsel annihilating oneself as losing oneself in gazing at Something, Some One infinitely greater than us. Whenever our spiritual eyes are fixed on God we lose our natural self-centeredness in the process. It was, for Lewis, a matter of focus. Inwardness is displaced by an “outwardness” that comes with focusing on our Lord.

I would submit that this profound forgetting is, at the very least, the beginning of the dying that the Bible speaks of. As we become more and more drawn to the glory of God in Christ our Adamic self-obsession begins to fade. Our self-centeredness becomes God-centeredness.

Of course the Christian life must be something other than a continuous rapturous gazing at the divine. In this world, at best, we seem able to have only limited experiences of “the Beatific Vision”. A constant knowing of God in this way will have to wait for Heaven for even the most contemplative saint. No one can spend all their waking hours in such a state of meditation, nor should they, for our mission as sons and daughters of God on Earth requires that we live out a good deal of our lives here in loving action towards others in the name of our Lord and Savior. In other words, dying to ourselves in times of “Godward” contemplation should result in a further dying to ourselves through the act of loving others. When the Bible speaks of this process it is often in the context of learning to love others in very practical and sometimes very sacrificial ways.

However the proverbial baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. An old Christian cliché concerns the benighted believer who is “so heavenly-minded that he/she is no earthly good.” The implication is that some Christians are so obsessed with spiritual visions that they have forgotten that God primarily wants them to be about the business of good works. An assumption is made here that these two things are somehow mutually exclusive. This is, I think, rarely if ever true. Many of us try to love through sheer self-effort, accent on the self. Consciously or unconsciously relying on our flesh to provide the power to love is a tragic error. In trying to love others in this way we find ourselves doing so for the wrong reason and under the wrong power. Such “love” ends up being much more about us than about the supposed object of our love and the act of “loving” ends up based on the very self we are called to die to. As such it becomes narcissistic and compulsive. True love is neither of these things.

It is only through being filled with the love of Christ that we can “overflow” that love to others and an indispensable part of this happening is making the decision to spend substantial periods of time centering our consciousness on our Lord and on our Lord alone. Whether this comes through worship or biblically-congruent forms of meditation it is absolutely necessary to becoming more genuinely loving. Again it is largely in forgetting ourselves through focusing on the divine that we die to ourselves. In focusing on God we open up a primary means of both loving Him and being filled with his love for others. While we will not always (or even often) be caught up into utter spiritual rapture through such focusing, with time we can come to almost always connect with God in a profound way. This contemplative connection serves the purpose of enabling us to better love our Creator and Redeemer because we end up experiencing His love for us in a very real sense and, as Scripture tells us, “we love because he first loved us”. Beyond that this experience can more than fill us leading to that overflowing love for others.

Through the help we receive from God in spending time with Him in this way we can further our self-forgetfulness and truly “die to self” in a way that does not cause fear as much as a joyful sense of expectation. It is the expectation that knowing and loving God will set us free to know and love others….and in doing so find a deeper, more blessed union with Christ, the One who loves us more than we can know in our wildest imaginations….that is until we meet Him face to face.