matthew on Self-Destruction

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...

In the vast, frozen wilderness of the Arctic, an Inuit hunter used a clever technique to trap a wolf. He took a sharp knife and carefully coated its blade with layers of animal blood, letting each lay...

Resentment is like a poison we carry around inside us with the hope that when we get the chance we can deposit it where it will harm another who has injured us. The fact is that we carry this poison a...

Gracious God, I am reminded today of the horrible pain that sin causes. How many lives are destroyed by sin? How many families rent apart? How many parents overcome with grief? And this is just the be...

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end...

The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...

Most of us recognize that self-deception hampers our ability to grow and live healthy lives. The Arbinger Institute takes it a bit further in their best-selling book Leadership and Self-Deception ...

But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last To basest things.

There is not any thing, relating to men and characters, more surprising and unaccountable, than this partiality to themselves. . . . Hence it is that many men seem perfect strangers to their own chara...

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity. Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Deliver me, O Lord, from that evil man, myself.

There’s undeniably a dark side to restless ambition, however. You can see it in dramatic fashion in the documentary  Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop , which follows the comedian on tour after he left the To...

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

We can prostitute our very souls in our attempts to be successful. We can sell out, cave in and go morally bankrupt chasing the god of success. Knowing this perilous potential, Jesus himself warns us ...

Man's basic problem is preoccupation with self. He is innately beset with narcissism, a condition named after the Greek mythological character Narcissus, who spent his life admiring his reflection...

To me one of the most terrifying scenes in all of literature is in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman . Willy Loman is a traveling salesman who feels that he is largely a failure. His self-pity...

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. T...

To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.

At some point in childhood we all make the powerful discovery that we can manipulate the truth about ourselves.

Andrew Carnegie rose to become among the world's richest individuals through his steel empire. In the midst of this acquisition of massive wealth at just thirty-three years old—Carnegie conducted ...

If I am in denial about my own weaknesses and sin, there will be a concomitant blindness to the greatness and glory of God.

Feel your sinfulness. Let it humble you. Let it sober you. Beware of so filling your life with talk shows and phone calls that you don’t regularly stop and consider the ruinous condition of your life ...

I have a neighbor who is obsessively neat. He lives on ten forested acres, and every time he drove up his long, winding driveway, the disorderly dead branches on the Ponderosa pine trees bothered him....

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good term...