One of the most popular mantras in our current culture is, ‘Be true to yourself’ or ‘Follow your heart’. One of the more recent and trendy version is ‘You do you’. There is a gym in the heart of Brisbane’s CBD that uses the slogan, “Be Fit. Be Well. Be You”. One school’s marketing has this advice for its current and future students: “Be inspired, Be Challenged. Be Excellent. Be You”.
Brian Rosner opines, “Popular culture regularly taps into this preoccupation with self-knowledge and self-expression…Personal identity today is all about self-definition and self-expression”. Assuming that it is a call to authenticity and being truthful about who we are, some Christians have adopted or offered the slogan as if it were a Christian truth.
However, in his book, provocatively titled, ‘Do not be true to yourself’, Kevin De Young rightly points out that our culture’s obsession with authenticity is only a half-truth. He argues that undoubtedly, one of the chief ethical motivations in the New Testament is: be who you are but it needs to be qualified.
For instance, the philosophical assumption underpinning the slogan, ‘Be true to yourself’, is the notion that each individual is and ought to be their own standard of truth or as philosopher Andrew Potter argues, ‘when it comes to personal fulfilment, many of us subscribe to the idea that the self is an act of artistic creation’.
The mindset that there are objective, empirical and scientific facts is no longer assumed. It is now assumed that, “I feel, therefore I am”. Our identity, we’re told is found in our desires. To deny one’s desires is to deny one’s truest identity. Consider the lyrics from one of the best-selling songs of all time sung by Elsa from the movie, “Frozen”, which is so indicative of the spirit of our age and a favourite in the LGBTQ+ community: ‘It’s time to see what I can do/ To test the limits and breakthrough/ No right, no wrong, no rules for me/ I’m free!’ This mindset is completely at odds with what the Bible teaches. For instance:
“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12).
“The heart is deceitful above all else and beyond cure…” (Jeremiah 17:9).
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).
“…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)
De Young is right with his assertion that ‘you should not be true to yourself’, that the ‘real you is worth letting out if the real you is dead to sin and alive in Christ Jesus’. A better way to live and forge a sense of self is as the apostle Paul puts it, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I know live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
Following Jesus,
Mark
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