How to see yourself with clarity

It is true that we need to be careful how we live.  We need to have eyes of discernment.  We need to see ourselves clearly, to have the cloudiness of cataracts and the murkiness of sleepiness removed.  But how?

In his book, Speaking the Truth in Love, David Powlison offers some insight on this very issue:

How do you learn to see straight and think straight, when something inside you compulsively bends in the wrong direction?

You need a clear-eyed realism about the human tendency towards self-blinding.…

Jesus’ almighty kindness comes to sinful people in order to recreate us as children of God’s glory. He remakes us poor in spirit, so we face our dire need for outside help.  He remakes us boldly committed and grateful, knowing whom we have believed.  He remakes us tender-hearted regarding the interests of others.  As you become willing to “have other thoughts” of yourself than those that arise spontaneously, you initiate a torrent of other changes.  The over-throw of your self-righteousness produces wonderfully different thoughts about Jesus Christ and other people.

But the soul’s blind self-love resists this sort of change.  The one activity that creates the truly human life feels harmful to us instinctively.  What keeps us from loving and needing God with all that we are?  Something in us doesn’t want to face the Someone who insists on having the first and last say about our lives.  Naturally, that something in us does not want to be seen for what it is.  It is allergic to the truth about ourselves because we have an allergic reaction to “spiritual submission to God.”  We say No, No, No to life on God’s terms, and we forfeit self-knowledge in the bargain.

So the first step to seeing ourselves with clarity is to acknowledge that we do not see ourselves with clarity are sinfully prone to denying what we are and that we are also wholly dependent upon the grace of God to transform us from self-deceivers into God-believers.  It is only as we acknowledge that sin of self-deception and its twin sister, resistance to God, that we will be able to start down the path of genuine discipleship and following hard after God.