matthew on Self-Justification

It is estimated that over 80 percent of the books published in any given year are about the self.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams observes that the biblical ideal is not so much that we need to deny the self as to decenter the self: To see the self in truth, as an integral member of a comm...

Prayer that is used for any other purpose, no matter how lofty, than to personally converse with a personal God is a sham. It must never be used as part of public relations. It must never be put to th...

A. W. Tozer once wrote,  Left to ourselves we tend immediately to reduce God to manageable terms. We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him. We want a ...

When we speak of being the steward of our life, something else must be stressed. We are called to be the steward not of some ideal life or even the life we wish we had; rather we are called to be stew...

I can lose my job; I might be released from a position. My career can come to an end when I retire from the organization I work in. But my vocation comes from God; it remains and is not in the end som...

People who are suffering often turn to their pastors, hoping to understand their experiences and seeking help with the feeling that God has abandoned them. Sometimes their faith is firm, but their sou...

Self-righteousness is a sense of moral superiority that appoints us as prosecutor of other people’s sinfulness. We relate to others as if we are incapable of the sins they commit. Self-righteousness w...

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...

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...

Researchers at the University of London concluded that “a substantial majority of individuals believe themselves to be morally superior to the average person” and that this illusion of ours is “unique...

In this excellent little character study, Tolstoy describes the inner monologue of the character Pierre Bezuhov from War & Peace , who is able to justify and convince himself that a promise made ...

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

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

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...

Almighty God, we take pride in our self-sufficiency while we look down on the weak who cannot provide for themselves. We praise others for their efforts, yet we demand perfection from our own families...

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...

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 ...

O my Lord, I discern in my anger a sense of self-righteousness, which is much too close to pleasure. And I think of you, Lord. You were never angry in your own defense, and you took no pleasure in ang...

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...

In her excellent book on following Jesus in the suburbs, Ashley Hales describes one of the ways in which our discipleship has been influenced by modern secular trends such as the desire for self-actua...

The ancient Greek word for actor was hypocritēs (ὑποκρῐτής), which, at first, only implied someone who explained or interpreted something. But by New Testament times, it was more negative. It suggest...

In the context of justice, I think what Christians need to confess about their pride isn’t so much about taking credit away from God but from the people we help. One version of this is sometimes refer...

I take a page from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and I define sin as building your identity—your self-worth and happiness—on anything other than God. Instead of telling them they are sinning b...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

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

An Applicable Passage There are a number of passages in God’s Word, both in the Old and New Testaments in which the original context no longer bears much resemblance to our own. In those cases, preac...

My friend Christina, a licensed therapist, tells me that Psychiatry 101 teaches therapists that when you and I choose to believe a lie about ourselves, it’s one of these three lies we believe: I’m he...

As any parent of small children will tell you, children have an amazingly acute sense of justice. Even the most fractional disparity in the distribution of the most trivial family good will be met wit...

Self-made and self-sufficient people live in a fantasy world, empty of the reality of God. In contrast, the poor in spirit are deeply aware of being God-made and God-sufficient: