Gospel Hope for Self-Haters

00:00:04.700 | Well, Christians are not immune from self-hatred.

00:00:08.400 | Self-hate ranges between a feeling of self-disappointment to self-condemnation.

00:00:13.800 | We look around at others and perhaps we hate ourselves for how we look, how we feel,

00:00:18.400 | what we've done, what's been done to us, or what we keep failing to accomplish.

00:00:23.900 | This self-hatred often lives under the surface of our lives

00:00:27.100 | because it has never been named and identified.

00:00:30.000 | And some Christians perpetually feel like losers, like they never measure up and they grow angry.

00:00:36.800 | This is self-hate and it can fuel self-condemnation and feed all sorts of false attempts at self-atonement.

00:00:44.700 | And while the spiritual implications of the struggle are huge,

00:00:48.300 | not much has been written for Christians who struggle with self-hate.

00:00:52.500 | For those who live with the shame of what has been done to them,

00:00:54.900 | Ed Walsh's 2012 book, "Shame Interrupted, How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection,"

00:01:01.600 | has proven very helpful.

00:01:03.700 | But what about those who feel self-hate for something they have brought on to themselves,

00:01:07.500 | some personal sin or some personal failure?

00:01:11.600 | Bible counselor David Powelson is the executive director of the CCEF,

00:01:16.300 | the senior editor of the Journal of the Vocal Counseling,

00:01:19.900 | and he will be publishing a new book in September titled,

00:01:22.400 | "Good and Angry, Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining, and Bitterness."

00:01:28.700 | His book on anger addresses the topic of self-hate.

00:01:32.100 | And I recently sat down with Dr. Powelson for an unhurried weekend conversation

00:01:37.100 | about gospel hope for self-haters.

00:01:40.000 | And this episode will extend far beyond our average of nine-minute episodes

00:01:43.800 | as we just explore in detail this theme of self-hate.

00:01:50.000 | Dr. Powelson, it's always a joy to talk with you.

00:01:52.500 | Tony, it is a real pleasure.

00:01:54.200 | It's been a long time since you and I have connected, and you are a brother,

00:01:57.400 | and a joyous thing when brothers can connect to each other.

00:02:00.900 | Yes, amen. It has been far too long.

00:02:03.200 | And as you know, for our time together here, I want to talk about self-hatred.

00:02:07.300 | This is something you've been thinking about for a long time,

00:02:09.900 | but it doesn't get addressed much in the church.

00:02:12.400 | And so I'll open with really a broad question first, and we'll go from here.

00:02:16.900 | How do you define self-hate, and what's at play here?

00:02:20.700 | What's really at the root?

00:02:22.700 | Let me say first off that there are a lot of moving pieces in this.

00:02:26.300 | It is a very common, complex, deeply rooted issue that human beings struggle with.

00:02:32.200 | It has a number of vectors, angles, different factors that come into play.

00:02:37.100 | In its essence, it is simply a judgment that we make against ourselves.

00:02:44.500 | It is a voice of condemnation, accusation, a voice that shouts or whispers failure,

00:02:52.300 | unclean, damned, a voice of self-loathing, and so forth.

00:02:57.500 | Now, having said that, at its most, that's the, you might say, the overt door

00:03:02.600 | into us talking about the topic.

00:03:05.300 | But I would actually say that for us to understand clearly,

00:03:10.900 | we need to take a big step back and say, "What is this issue fundamentally?"

00:03:17.900 | And my starting point on understanding it and then addressing it is,

00:03:23.300 | essentially, it's an issue of the conscience.

00:03:26.300 | The conscience, which is the New Testament word, and then the metaphor, "in your eyes,"

00:03:32.400 | you know, every man that was right in his own eyes, it's according to his own evaluation.

00:03:38.000 | The conscience is this evaluative capacity that is wired into us.

00:03:42.500 | We are in God's image, and so we are wired to make judgments.

00:03:46.800 | And we are wired as human beings to make judgments of everything,

00:03:49.900 | of the weather, of the food we're eating, of God, of the events that are happening in our world,

00:03:55.700 | of other people, of ourselves.

00:03:58.400 | And when we're talking about self-hate, then, it is anchored in something that has a,

00:04:05.800 | there's a creational underpinning in terms of that we are made to evaluate, but then we are fallen.

00:04:12.400 | Our conscience is skewed, which basically means in a variety of ways, we misjudge.

00:04:17.800 | We falsely evaluate. We falsely condemn, and we falsely commend.

00:04:22.400 | We like and approve of things that may be off,

00:04:25.400 | and we attack and are judgmental towards things that we ought to love.

00:04:30.900 | And that skewing has, one of the ways I think about it, has at least four different ways that our conscience gets distorted

00:04:40.100 | that all have a bearing on the self-hatred issue.

00:04:43.100 | The first is that we live before the wrong eyes.

00:04:46.200 | 1 Corinthians 4 is a lovely, profound passage on how Paul says,

00:04:51.300 | "You know, it doesn't really matter what you think of me.

00:04:54.200 | In fact, it doesn't really matter what I think of myself. It's the Lord who judges."

00:04:58.800 | Now, that doesn't mean Paul doesn't assess himself.

00:05:01.800 | You know, he says, "I'm not aware of anything against me, but it's God who judges."

00:05:06.600 | And so, one of the ways the conscience skews is I become attuned where my own opinion of myself

00:05:15.100 | and other people's opinion of me, which are these two vectors in which self-hatred most often works,

00:05:22.600 | those eyes become what's important, and the eyes of God recede into the backdrop or are distorted.

00:05:30.400 | We get a false view of how God might view us.

00:05:34.700 | The second thing we could say in it is, not only am I living before the wrong eyes,

00:05:39.200 | it is one distortion of how I evaluate the world, but I listen to the wrong voice.

00:05:43.000 | So, in the area of self-hatred, I hear accusatory voices that others might say to me,

00:05:49.500 | you know, people who perhaps mocked me or attacked me, that I say to myself that ultimately,

00:05:55.500 | the accuser and liar who stands behind all lies is the voice.

00:06:01.500 | Even if I think it's God who is accusing me, I distort that God, so he's a God of no mercy.

00:06:08.000 | He's a Satan, in a sense, who is merely damning.

00:06:12.300 | The third disorientation is I stand next to the wrong standard, and that's a huge issue.

00:06:18.600 | Whether the things for which I condemn myself are, are they actual wrongs?

00:06:24.600 | Are they things like killing someone, an abortion? Are they anger and hostility?

00:06:30.900 | Is it sexual immorality? Is it that I've lied or made a false representation?

00:06:35.400 | Or is it a sense of failure because I'm not as good-looking as I want to be or not as athletic,

00:06:40.700 | or my brother makes more money than me? What's the standard against which I fail?

00:06:47.900 | And then the final skewing is that I look to the wrong Savior.

00:06:53.400 | Who's the sin bearer? And am I the sin bearer? Do I punish myself and atone and try and make up

00:06:59.600 | and try and make it all better? Or do I actually have a Savior?

00:07:03.000 | Is there a sin bearer for true wrong? Is there the power of a living Holy Spirit to renew my conscience

00:07:10.400 | so that I live before the right eyes in the fear of God?

00:07:13.800 | I listen to the right voice, the voice of a God of redeeming love.

00:07:18.300 | I stand next to the right standard, which is the standard of faith and love,

00:07:22.600 | and I look to the right Savior. So those are all these background issues that it's that inner twisting

00:07:30.600 | of how we look at the world and at ourselves and assess it that then underlies the way that one of the ways

00:07:38.700 | that the conscience can go very bad and become very destructive is self-hatred.

00:07:44.200 | Yeah, God's role here is huge, and I want to press into that in a little bit.

00:07:48.600 | But first, how does self-hatred most often manifest?

00:07:51.700 | I mean, what are the warning signs you are looking for?

00:07:54.500 | And what are the most common root causes that drive self-hate?

00:07:58.400 | You know, this is one of these places where the question of self-hatred,

00:08:03.100 | and it abuts really closely with a bunch of issues that our culture would talk about under the category of low self-esteem.

00:08:15.000 | You know, the word "esteem" is an evaluative word, and it has to do with how I evaluate myself.

00:08:20.500 | I don't particularly like the word. I think it's a distorted, strong word to use,

00:08:24.300 | but it's the culture's attempt at what they're describing that goes on in people is real.

00:08:32.800 | So I was just talking with a man a few weeks ago who is a mature man, a mature Christian.

00:08:40.300 | He'd just been going through some real soul-searching, and he had realized that over many years, there had been—

00:08:49.900 | I'll put it in his words, "I always felt condemned inside."

00:08:54.200 | It's as though there was this inner voice that always said, "You're never good enough.

00:08:59.300 | You always blank. You didn't. You won't. You can't."

00:09:03.800 | And it was the voice of my father, who was a very critical man.

00:09:07.600 | It has been in recent weeks, as I've been seeing this for what it is and seeing how pervasive it is,

00:09:13.000 | it is as if the Lord has been saying to me, "You know, I am your real father. I give you something better.

00:09:19.800 | I actually speak of you and know you through a different lens.

00:09:23.300 | You have a different identity than the one that you are measuring yourself by."

00:09:29.100 | This man just made a really profound comment.

00:09:32.400 | He said, "You know, I was talking with my wife, and I said,

00:09:36.100 | 'For years, it's always been as if daily life was in living color and God was in gray tones.'"

00:09:42.600 | And he is reversing that.

00:09:44.300 | And that voice, the wrong voice, the voice of a critical human being,

00:09:49.800 | that damned me, is being replaced by the voice of a father who justly assesses us for real failings

00:09:55.300 | and does it with real mercy, is right there.

00:10:00.600 | Yeah, and for him and for all of his apparent failures, he heard his father's voice of condemnation.

00:10:07.500 | In another example, one I often read about in the APJ inbox is from our listeners.

00:10:12.000 | It has to do with body issues.

00:10:14.600 | If a woman hates herself for being fat, it can lead to binge eating,

00:10:19.400 | which of course leads to hating oneself more for binge eating and weight gain and on and on.

00:10:25.000 | It goes, "Self-hate seems to function as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy."

00:10:31.200 | It's a prophetic voice.

00:10:33.900 | And every human being lives by prophets, if you will.

00:10:37.900 | We're always listening to a voice, and that voice can be one we self-generate.

00:10:42.400 | It could be one that other cultures messages.

00:10:45.400 | It can be the voice of God, the true voice of God.

00:10:48.000 | It can be various kinds of lies from socio-cultural, you know, peer pressure advertising, cultural images,

00:10:56.500 | or in the case I just mentioned, a parent.

00:10:59.800 | So yeah, there are self-destructive cycles where what we believe hooks into directly to then how we interpret life,

00:11:10.600 | how we interpret ourselves or events.

00:11:13.400 | It hooks directly into then what we do.

00:11:15.900 | You could say that in, and this would just be one possible way, possible scenario in the example you just gave, Tony,

00:11:22.700 | is that the voice tells, you know, my voice tells me I'm a horrible person.

00:11:26.700 | I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm a failure, nobody will love me.

00:11:30.700 | Food is both a "cause" because I overeat, but then food is the savior because it's the one place where I feel at least temporarily a sense of comfort and relief.

00:11:44.000 | And even though it actually compounds my problem, so what you could say there is you've got this mini-drama of redemption happening with sin and condemnation and then salvation.

00:11:58.700 | Only the entire drama is skewed because our weight is not one of the Ten Commandments.

00:12:07.100 | There are issues of gluttony that are worth dealing with, but in the case you're describing, it's a much more profound issue of like, what is my identity?

00:12:17.900 | How do I define myself?

00:12:20.100 | What is the standard by which who I am as a person is?

00:12:24.000 | And let's say I have a hormonal disorder or genetic propensity to be large, not thin.

00:12:31.600 | I'm condemning myself for something that is actually part of creation.

00:12:35.500 | Or let's say I'm taking medication that causes swelling, retention of fluid.

00:12:43.200 | So I'm damning myself for something which is actually not what my true identity is.

00:12:48.800 | It's damning myself for a lie and then it just perpetuates itself and I do the very thing that keeps more condemnation on me as an attempt to find a temporary soothing or a savior in the moment.

00:13:03.100 | Yeah, and the temporary soothing savior pushes us into greater self-hate.

00:13:08.800 | If I can go existential for just a moment, it seems like self-hatred is a trap of perceived failure or being told that you're only a failure.

00:13:18.400 | And then this self-condemnation becomes a self-fulfilling loop of prophecy that over time becomes more and more inescapable and more and more damaging.

00:13:28.300 | Does that get to it?

00:13:30.000 | That's a good way to put it.

00:13:31.600 | Sure, that's very powerful.

00:13:33.300 | You know, actually, let's camp there a minute because one, I think there's a lot of different angles you could describe where you get trapped and you flag one that's very prominent, a sense of failure, I'm bad, I'm condemned, a sense of moral failure.

00:13:57.300 | But then there's, again, our human experience has so many interlocking complexes.

00:14:03.600 | Like you could say it's also failure is one motif that might really be helpful for a certain struggler.

00:14:10.400 | Another is the, and you think how that failure motif is so profoundly spoken to by the love of God in Christ that you can acknowledge real failures and there's true mercy.

00:14:24.000 | You are beloved, even despite real failures.

00:14:27.300 | And then this correction of the spirit works where those perceived failures that are actually distortions, you could progress all your newest.

00:14:36.000 | But then you think of this lens, this sense of being an outcast, being rejected, being isolated from people.

00:14:45.200 | And then you again think how the love of God actually comes to that and says, you know, the one who is the outcast, the one who is despised and shamed is actually my beloved.

00:14:55.800 | I welcome you.

00:14:57.300 | I'm yours.

00:14:58.500 | Come in.

00:14:59.400 | I'm your father.

00:15:00.200 | You're not cast out.

00:15:02.300 | Or you could come to the lens of feeling exposed and naked and vulnerable, like everything that's wrong with you is just out there to be seen, which someone who struggles with obesity really is exposed in our culture and that sense of shame in that.

00:15:19.200 | And so here's a God who promises he covers us.

00:15:22.800 | He makes us safe like we aren't exposed and in danger.

00:15:28.500 | Or you think of the lens of your dirty, you're unclean, you're a horrible person, you're despicable, you're disgusting.

00:15:36.200 | And here's a guy that says, you're not dirty.

00:15:38.100 | I have washed you.

00:15:39.600 | I wash your feet, even though sins are scarlet, even though you're as white as snow, you've been cleaned by my love.

00:15:51.200 | And then one final one, kind of a different, you know, failure, outcast, exposed, dirty would be degraded.

00:15:58.400 | You're degraded, you're dehumanized, you don't matter, you're invalidated.

00:16:02.700 | And we have a God who says, I don't know, it's right there in Psalm 22, he has not treated lightly the affliction of the afflicted.

00:16:12.500 | He has not abhorred and pulled himself back.

00:16:15.100 | So it's like we're not, we're validated, we're, we count, we're cared for, we matter, rather than that sense of being degraded, decrystallized, dehumanized.

00:16:27.600 | And you could just look at many different pieces of the experience and some of those different ways of talking about what goes on,

00:16:36.200 | but sort of the result of self-hate and the kind of milieu of self-hate, different ones of those may really strike a nerve with a different struggler.

00:16:45.700 | And in each case, there's something, it just, it is one of those wonderful things how there's always something about the nature of who our Lord is

00:16:56.200 | and how specifically he cares for us that just maps straight on to the experiences we might struggle with.

00:17:06.200 | Yes. Yeah, God is the only escape from this loop of self-hate, yet many self-haters would say that this is not the God that I know.

00:17:14.200 | What would you say to those who struggle with self-hate, especially outside of the church,

00:17:18.700 | who, they automatically assume that the worst thing in the world for a self-hater is to ever believe in God,

00:17:26.200 | because he would only condemn them and fuel their self-hate even further. What would you say to that person?

00:17:32.200 | Sure. You know, I'm gonna not unpack all the process that might go into that conversation, but maybe get to the bottom line.

00:17:41.200 | Your idea of God is my idea of the devil.

00:17:44.200 | Yeah, wow.

00:17:45.700 | You are viewing God the way that the scripture portrays Satan, this relentless, accusatory, hard master,

00:17:55.200 | who means ill for you and is always there to scold you. And that is not the God of the Bible.

00:18:01.700 | The God of the Bible, yes, has a just anger when there's real wrong.

00:18:07.200 | But it is interesting how, you know, take the person who sense of shame and failure is because of what's happened to them,

00:18:13.700 | in ways they've been mistreated or mocked or lied to. This is the God who, his anger actually comes to your defense.

00:18:20.700 | He's the protector of victims. He's the refuge for those who suffer, oppressors and liars.

00:18:27.700 | That's a theme in many, many songs, is God's anger is actually a part of his love in that sense, that he's our defender.

00:18:36.700 | When against what's false and harmful. And then where there's just anger at things we've really done wrong.

00:18:45.200 | This is the God who came in person. As the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

00:18:51.200 | There is true mercy. So that sense that, you know, if I believe in God, it would just keep up more condemnation.

00:19:01.700 | It's actually the fact that the person doesn't believe in God.

00:19:06.700 | They're now continuing to manifest the distortion of their unbelief in how they imagined that God might be.

00:19:15.700 | They're not being the God who came in person, who sympathizes with our weaknesses, was tested in all ways like as we are, yet without sin.

00:19:25.700 | And therefore, there's a throne of grace where there's mercy to be received. There's forgiveness.

00:19:32.700 | There's love, there's care and then grace to help in our time of need.

00:19:36.700 | But actually, in the moment when we're struggling, there's grace there. There's this power and presence to actually help us.

00:19:46.700 | The self-hater must live before God's eyes, led by God's voice, be measured by God's standard and delivered by God's Savior.

00:19:55.700 | I mean, you did such a great job explaining this from the onset. So there is a freedom in God's standards, right?

00:20:03.700 | And among the standards are a proper view of who you are.

00:20:07.700 | The Ten Commandments are only the, you might say, the bones of those standards.

00:20:15.700 | But, you know, he tells us things. God gives us a definition of ourselves.

00:20:20.700 | He tells us that we are creatures. We're actually made to need him.

00:20:26.700 | We actively, every human being, whether they love him or hate him, know him or repress the knowledge of him,

00:20:33.700 | needs him and lives dependent on his kindness.

00:20:37.700 | He tells us that we are sinful, that we have fallen short of love for him and a tender heart towards our neighbors.

00:20:47.700 | And thus we come under judgment. But then he says, I've come, he comes, the whole way that the scripture comes,

00:20:54.700 | it is, it gets revealed in the context of redemption happening of a God who moves into the human dilemma in order to bring grace and bring resolution.

00:21:09.700 | Those are all identity statements. You know, those are all true things about ourselves.

00:21:13.700 | And then he's a God who gives gifts.

00:21:15.700 | So there can be a fair and honest assessment of what are the gifts he's given and how can these be used?

00:21:22.700 | And, you know, what is that going to mean?

00:21:24.700 | You might say in the things I have to contribute in relationships or the things that I bring to my friendships or to marriage or to the small group I'm in.

00:21:35.700 | He gives gifts. And you think of every one of those identity statements,

00:21:39.700 | even the ones that are very humbling and challenging that do address our real failings.

00:21:45.700 | They all go somewhere that ultimately has joy and gratitude as a payoff.

00:21:52.700 | And it doesn't mean there's not struggle.

00:21:54.700 | You know, one of the things that has really struck me reading the Psalms, loving the Psalms,

00:22:02.700 | is that there's only one Psalm in which there's absolutely no shadow in the backdrop or looming shadow of either evils we struggle with in ourselves or evils that beset us,

00:22:14.700 | you know, liars and killers.

00:22:16.700 | And it's Psalm 150.

00:22:18.700 | It takes you all the way to the end.

00:22:20.700 | And all that's left is joy.

00:22:23.700 | And the first hundred forty nine, you might say, all of us have somewhere in them.

00:22:29.700 | This world is a hard place.

00:22:31.700 | This world has difficulties.

00:22:33.700 | We actually can seek and find our Heavenly Father, our Savior, our Shepherd, our life giver, our refuge, our truth giver in the midst of the things of the exact places we struggle.

00:22:48.700 | Yeah, that's very perceptive.

00:22:50.700 | One of the things I've noticed is that when you address self-hate, it is typically in the context of anger.

00:22:56.700 | So how does anger expose areas of self-hate in our lives?

00:23:01.700 | You know, again, I'm going to make a bit of a background comment because I, we all love a simple answer.

00:23:11.700 | And but, you know, the human condition doesn't boil down to like, you know, a tweet.

00:23:19.700 | So the way I understand it, and this is the way I think throughout most of the history of thoughtful Christian reflection, theological reflection on human experience, on scripture, that hate is actually the larger category.

00:23:33.700 | The huge divide in reality is between love and hate. And it mirrors the divide between true and false and the divide between faith and unbelief and divide between good and evil.

00:23:49.700 | So there's this fundamental divide. And, you know, as we think about how our conscience works, both love and hate do get distorted.

00:24:01.700 | So I can love myself and commend myself and think I'm great and feel righteous and think I see truly, and then I'm completely distorted.

00:24:11.700 | But I can do the same in how I hate myself.

00:24:13.700 | So hate is actually the bigger category. It's just linked with the biggest issues of all for us as human beings.

00:24:22.700 | You might say the subcategories would be, anger would be a subcategory.

00:24:27.700 | There's going to be a more specific, I'm angry at myself. You know, how did I do that? I was so stupid. I can't believe I said that. I did that again.

00:24:36.700 | I'm not a horrible person. How could God ever love me? I mean, you might say that's a temper tantrum directed at myself.

00:24:44.700 | But then you get also other variants, other unhappy variants, like the feeling of hopelessness or despair, melancholy.

00:24:54.700 | And there can be a kind of self-laceration, self-hatred that is more just sorrowful and aggrieved and depressed and hopeless.

00:25:07.700 | You can get the negative feelings, you might say, and it's being fearful and anxious and panicky over my perceived inadequacies and failures.

00:25:19.700 | You can get, you know, what emotion do you call it? The feeling of just being overwhelmed.

00:25:24.700 | Feeling overwhelmed is one of the most common experiences that Psalms capture.

00:25:28.700 | It doesn't tightly break down into an emotional category. It says a lot of things packed into it.

00:25:35.700 | So, you know, anger is certainly one of the lenses that really helps you understand self-hatred.

00:25:43.700 | It can flare in a moment of self-condemnation. But self-hatred is probably the, you know, self-hatred as an expression of a conscience that is miskeyed and disoriented is probably the overarching category.

00:26:01.700 | You've written this quote, "The eyes that self-haters live before are often a composite of what the Bible calls pride in the fear of man."

00:26:12.700 | Explain this. How does this work?

00:26:14.700 | You know, the man that I spoke of a bit ago, it was his father's voice and fear of man is taking our cues off of what another person says.

00:26:26.700 | And it was also his own voice inside himself, you know, something he said to himself.

00:26:31.700 | He failed against the eyes of a very significant person in his life, and he failed in his own eyes.

00:26:41.700 | And that composite, one of the ways I've sometimes thought about it, what I found helpful to people in counseling ministry is when we lose our bearings, where the eyes of God, the voice of God, the standards of God, the salvation of God are not, they don't compel my experiential reality.

00:27:05.700 | Then I actually become awash in kind of in some combination of being overly sensitized to what other people think of me and overly sensitized to how I evaluate myself.

00:27:18.700 | And that, what I just said there would just read off of just almost the entirety of secular, like self-esteem literature, which sees accurately that people get, they quote their self-esteem as a composite of what others think of you and what you think of yourself.

00:27:35.700 | But they just, being secular, it disorients from the true dynamics of both of those, one of which the Bible would call pride, where I am the arbiter of reality, and one is fear of man, where other people are the arbiters of reality.

00:27:52.700 | So I would probably add a third piece and say that, and I'd say behind, those are pride and fear of man are in the front of the curtain, they're the onstage and behind the curtain, there is the devil who is the archetype of pride.

00:28:10.700 | And there is the devil who is the liar that we believe, the archetype of fear, we fear and take our cues off of a false voice.

00:28:21.700 | Yeah, that's very good. You know, you mentioned Twitter just a moment ago, and no doubt social media amps up how we compare ourselves and how we project ourselves.

00:28:29.700 | Is there a technological side to self-hate in this age of social media, especially visually, where what we can see online becomes a voice that we follow as well?

00:28:39.700 | I do think the technology, the visual technology in particular, accelerates certain forms of it.

00:28:48.700 | So we become immediately aware of forms of talent that, you know, let's say in sports or music or acting that, you know, if you lived in a small town in 1900 in rural America, the talent is like whoever got the lead in high school play, you know.

00:29:07.700 | The star athlete is whoever actually got to play quarterback, you know. But none of them are NFL caliber, none of them get contracts or $20 million to do a movie.

00:29:19.700 | So beauty and talent and money and possessions, and we are, because of the visual quality that is just the visual qualities of our culture that the media communicates to us, we are immediately aware of the most beautiful, the most talented, the most athletic, the most wealthy, the most luxurious lifestyles, the most exotic bucket lists.

00:29:44.700 | So, yeah, I have no doubt that you probably start going back to photography.

00:29:51.700 | And photography is the first medium where then you could start to see parts of the world that you never visualized outside of your immediate experience.

00:30:02.700 | But then movies accentuate that. And then, you know, the last 30 years has just been a highly accelerated awareness of what's out there.

00:30:13.700 | I was talking to somebody recently, they commented on one of the reasons they realized they were going to ditch their Facebook account is that their words were, "I realized that I was continually comparing my life to somebody else's highlight reel."

00:30:30.700 | What a great way to put it, you know? I don't know if it was original to her or she picked that up somewhere, but yeah, you're watching somebody's carefully curated, manicured, projected image of their life, and they're usually smiling.

00:30:47.700 | They don't have bad breath. Noting the social media is a really helpful way to then make contemporary the whole of the Bible's discussion of fear of man because it makes right in front of us the opinions and values and attitudes of other people.

00:31:07.700 | And this can be very compelling as fear of man always is. And it can feed self-loathing, you know?

00:31:15.700 | I mean, imagine what it's like. You take the weight issue where in our culture, having a body mass index, you know, over 30 is like a cardinal sin.

00:31:26.700 | You're the evil doer. Like you can be of any kind of sexual disorientation imaginable and you're actually extolled. But if your BMI is over a certain number, you're a sure loser. You're a pure loser in life and you're bound to die young. That's just not the way God's reality and truth works.

00:31:45.700 | Fascinating. So how do we care for brothers and sisters in Christ who particularly struggle with self-hate? Are there any keys for how we can do this wisely in our families and churches?

00:32:00.700 | Yeah, and that is, boy, whatever I'd say, Tony, is going to be merely a glimpse. It's a panorama. I mean, for example, one of the obvious starting points is we do a huge service to our brothers and sisters, to our children, to our spouse when we simply live by a different set of values.

00:32:24.700 | You think of the significance of a woman who does not live for her appearance. And, you know, she dresses tastefully, she dresses appropriately, you know, but she's not obsessed.

00:32:39.700 | She walks into a room and she's thinking about, you know, who's the only person here? Who's the old friend that I've seen in a while that I can reconnect to? And there's a freedom about her. There's a joy, there's a kindness, there's a freedom from anxiety.

00:32:55.700 | And so that, and that's just one example where I do think that our faith and the kind of lifestyle that emerges from it is very compelling and very liberating, being in a place where you are not being continually judged by bogus standards.

00:33:13.700 | But once you're being drawn to, like, what does it mean that we would, you know, to pick a common Old Testament phrase from Samuel and Kings, like, "Walked according to the ways of his father David."

00:33:26.700 | Like, okay, what does it mean to walk in the ways of his father David? David is a man after God's own heart.

00:33:32.700 | That's not just a picture, that's not depicting the fact that he's apparently very handsome, he's a great warrior. It's talking about the fact that he lived the Psalms.

00:33:42.700 | He was keenly aware of his sins. He wasn't perfect, he sinned flagrantly on occasions. He was aware of his sins, he knew that God was merciful, he sought God, he loved God, he expressed joy and gratitude for the blessings God gave.

00:34:00.700 | So, you know, I'd say to live after in the way of his father David is to live the Psalms.

00:34:05.700 | And boy, if you're in a community where people are orienting the meaning of life to living the Psalms, living in the wisdom of the Proverbs, living in the footsteps of the Redeemer, Jesus Christ, whose DNA is redemption,

00:34:20.700 | and approaching life as a venue in which the proud can be brought down and the humbled can be raised up, that's huge.

00:34:31.700 | That's just an atmospheric way that our conscience is renewed by being able to hang out with people that actually are putting their world together differently.

00:34:40.700 | Probably, if I were to just say one factor from a more pointed part, it does seem to me that as we think about the immediacy of the struggle with self-loathing, self-condemnation,

00:34:54.700 | "I'm so horrible, I don't do anything right, I'm just a disappointment, I'm a drain on everyone, I'm a loser," those are all voices.

00:35:02.700 | And they're voices that they rob us, they rob a person of faith, they rob a person of joy, they rob us of love, they rob us of ability to be centered and be thinking about others.

00:35:17.700 | So you've got to set up...the language I was thinking about as I was getting ready for us to talk was, "Tell me how to set up what you might call a contest of voices."

00:35:27.700 | We're having these political debates currently and it's the most terrible form of debate, it's just mutual mockery.

00:35:34.700 | So what's a constructive debate? How do you get a different voice talking?

00:35:40.700 | I think of this, my wife Nan and I happened to be reading in the end of Zephaniah and thinking about the issue of self-hatred and you think,

00:35:50.700 | "Okay, in self-hatred, one feels a deep sense of shame and imperfection."

00:35:56.700 | And so here's just a line out of Zephaniah, "On that day, you shall not be put to shame."

00:36:03.700 | It's like, that is fighting the voice of shame or the sense that one is all alone and completely struggling and no one is for me or with me and the world is a dangerous place and people are judging me.

00:36:19.700 | Here's a line out of Zephaniah 3, "The Lord is in your midst and you shall never again fear evil."

00:36:27.700 | You know, the voices of falsity and lie and condemnation and you're stupid and you always blow it, it's evil.

00:36:35.700 | And so here's a, "I'm in your midst, you're not alone, you don't ever need to fear evil. I'm mighty, one who saves."

00:36:43.700 | You know, that touches the sense of powerlessness, the sense that nobody could really love me because I'm so marred, I'm so dirty, I'm so shameful, I've failed so badly.

00:36:53.700 | Here's the voice of the Lord himself, "He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by his love."

00:37:03.700 | Hey, think of within self-loathing, there's a very talkative inner world going on that's very unhappy.

00:37:11.700 | "He'll quiet you with his love, he'll exult over you with loud singing."

00:37:15.700 | And, you know, I'm giving a bit of a barrage there, but you imagine to be able to take in one precise eyedropper of truth

00:37:27.700 | that would actually set up a contest of voices between the lie and something that is actually true.

00:37:36.700 | And in setting it that way, it's very different from, you might say, just cognitive rehearsing, Christian truths, theological truths.

00:37:48.700 | It's actually when God himself is the voice speaking, you know, saying, "The Lord, the Lord, gracious and compassionate, low to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin."

00:38:01.700 | He's actually saying something that competes with the false voices.

00:38:07.700 | And it's not just something you rehearse in your own head.

00:38:10.700 | He's actually inviting you to come out of yourself, out of the death spiral, you might say, the vortex of self-hatred, you know, as we're talking about it right now.

00:38:21.700 | And it's what you're creating there is that there's another voice that is talking here.

00:38:27.700 | And it may take me a long time and much prayer and the help of others and reminders to hear that voice.

00:38:34.700 | But whenever I hear that other voice talking, I'm actually pulled out of myself and I become open to God who loves me.

00:38:42.700 | I become open to that there's a place of mercy and hope and protection and welcome and refuge.

00:38:50.700 | And not affirmation in the sense of stroking your ego and making you feel good about yourself, but affirmation just gives you an identity worth living.

00:38:59.700 | You're a child of the living God and he's your father.

00:39:03.700 | And to be able to hear like the man I mentioned earlier in our conversation, you know, "I'm your true father and you're mine and I'm not going to forsake you."

00:39:11.700 | So that contest of voices, I think, is one real specific way that everyone who changes in this area, some form of that has actually happened in that man or woman's life.

00:39:25.700 | Those of us who love Reformed theology, as I know you do, will, you know, read our forefathers who perpetually stressed our self-humility before God.

00:39:35.700 | Fundamentally, what is the difference between destructive self-hatred and an appropriate self-humbling before God in repentance?

00:39:45.700 | And do you think that the Puritans in particular pushed us too far in an unhealthy direction here? What would you say?

00:39:53.700 | You know, it's hard to judge a man's heart from 300 years or 400 years distance.

00:40:01.700 | So I guess I would say my comment will more reflect some of the things I've seen contemporary Christians do with that heritage,

00:40:11.700 | where it does become an overly scrupulous, self-condemning, you know, "I'm always a wretch."

00:40:22.700 | One place that I might make this land, many of us are familiar with the collection of Puritan prayers, "Valley of Vision,"

00:40:36.700 | and it is very rich. It's the cream of a very thoughtful understanding of human sinfulness and God's mercy.

00:40:48.700 | And that I commend it for. That said, there is a continual tone in it, as I read it, that misses human suffering,

00:40:57.700 | that is willing to recognize, you know, the things we struggle with are not just that we've committed serious sins, but that we've been lied to.

00:41:06.700 | Like the man I mentioned earlier in our conversation, of course he's a sinner, and he's very aware of that.

00:41:11.700 | But you might say he's hyper aware of it. And often where our piety lands within the Reformed and evangelical world

00:41:20.700 | is where sin is the only problem, and suffering and the lies that are told us is kind of made secondary.

00:41:30.700 | And you read the Psalms and it's not secondary. It's a parallel, intertwined problem.

00:41:36.700 | Sin and suffering, the evils we generate out of our heart and the evils that beset us in lies and aggressions,

00:41:45.700 | they are in this continual dance and interplay.

00:41:49.700 | And so I would have—I've actually written in my copy of "Valley of Vision," interpolated a number of other prayers

00:41:58.700 | that capture the note of seeking God in the midst of afflictions and try to restore that balance in the Psalms.

00:42:04.700 | And then the other thing that I think can be missing there, it's missing in tone, though it is present in certain words,

00:42:13.700 | is just joy and gratitude, a genuine joy and gratitude that our God is good and is great,

00:42:20.700 | and the door into that is not always, "What a horrible person I am."

00:42:24.700 | The door, I mean, you can wake up in the morning and be simply, "This is the day the Lord has made.

00:42:30.700 | I will rejoice and be glad in that. Lord, clear the cobwebs from my mind. Awaken me to yourself. Teach me.

00:42:35.700 | I'm your servant," like Psalm 119 says.

00:42:38.700 | And Psalm 119 is very aware of our sinfulness and it's very aware of our sufferings and it's very joyful.

00:42:44.700 | And all those things seem to get on the table in a really striking interplay.

00:42:51.700 | So, yeah, I guess my answer to your question is I do see things in our piety,

00:42:56.700 | and you might say it, the emphases of our theology.

00:43:01.700 | Reformed theology is often so focused on the remedy to sin that restores our relationship to God.

00:43:08.700 | Goodness gracious, if you have to focus, you can hardly find a better place.

00:43:13.700 | But that narrow focus then misses the much more complex tapestry that the Psalms,

00:43:20.700 | building on that foundation, building on the way in which justification by faith, adoption, election, and so forth,

00:43:29.700 | they're all arrows launched in the Old Testament about God's steadfast love and mercy and his coming to be with his people.

00:43:37.700 | All those arrows land in the new in Jesus and we have this foundation.

00:43:41.700 | But then the other parts of human experience are not thereby minimized.

00:43:47.700 | Yeah, so it seems like the self-haters really need a lot of time to soak in the Psalms.

00:43:51.700 | Yeah, and not just soak in like the lines that make them feel more depressed.

00:43:57.700 | I think of just recently I've been thinking a lot about Psalm 40 and it starts out really joyful that,

00:44:03.700 | and it's because God did hear me when I was in trouble.

00:44:06.700 | He did save me, he rescued me out of the pit.

00:44:10.700 | And then there's fruitful ministry and joy and song and I proclaim your name.

00:44:14.700 | And then it has this turning point where all of a sudden, you know, evils without number are besetting me.

00:44:20.700 | My sins are more than the hairs on my head. There are people out to get me.

00:44:23.700 | I'm in trouble again. I'm in this dual trouble of my sinfulness and my sufferings.

00:44:28.700 | And yet it concludes then, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

00:44:34.700 | As for me, I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought for me.

00:44:38.700 | And so it ends with this profound sense of comfort that, yeah, you can look at your sins.

00:44:42.700 | You can even be crushed by them for a moment, but it goes somewhere.

00:44:48.700 | And it goes somewhere that ends up resounding and courageous and clear and glad and thankful.

00:44:55.700 | Amen. I think Sarah in Genesis 18 would be the patron saint of self-haters.

00:45:00.700 | You know, this old, decrepit, worn out, used up, barren, good for nothing wife of fatherless Abraham.

00:45:07.700 | That's her words in Genesis 18, 12, essentially.

00:45:10.700 | It seems that God loves to break into a life like that.

00:45:14.700 | One of Tim Keller's kind of marquee lines, you know, it's the upside down kingdom.

00:45:21.700 | And certainly that barrenness thing is one of the primo ways Scripture does that,

00:45:28.700 | whether it's a Sarah or Hannah, Rahab.

00:45:32.700 | And you get these people who, Jacob for that matter, it's a, I mean, he was a rat.

00:45:40.700 | Sarah was, Elizabeth, you know, had the shame of being unable to conceive.

00:45:46.700 | So whether it's that you're a manipulator and a con man,

00:45:50.700 | or whether it's that you have just failed in this thing that's really important,

00:45:55.700 | that a wife really hopes she can be a mom.

00:46:00.700 | I mean, the latter is not a moral failure.

00:46:02.700 | It's a form of suffering that can bring sense of shame also.

00:46:06.700 | But yeah, the Lord is a redeemer.

00:46:09.700 | We've all known really godly women, for example, who in God's providence,

00:46:14.700 | either never married or they married and they were unable to have children.

00:46:17.700 | And they have always had to go through a process of grappling with that, grappling with identity,

00:46:22.700 | grappling with what it means to be a woman, grappling with how does one find one's way to courage,

00:46:29.700 | dignity, and purpose.

00:46:31.700 | And we've all known women who really successfully ran that race.

00:46:36.700 | And they met the God who, though he, you know, the Bible is very joyful at the birth of children.

00:46:42.700 | Yet one of the prime metaphors in Isaiah 54 is of the barren woman who spreads her tent.

00:46:49.700 | She has a huge family. She loves many, many people, has many children.

00:46:53.700 | There's a great -- there's one of the lovely characters in C.S. Lewis's "Great Divorces."

00:47:00.700 | I forget her name now. It's been a while since I read it.

00:47:02.700 | But she was just an ordinary village woman.

00:47:05.700 | And it said every, you know, every lonely child was her friend and every cat knew that she cared.

00:47:12.700 | And she's a queen in the way that Lewis portrayed her.

00:47:16.700 | So full of legal glory.

00:47:19.700 | That upside down, that makes a different kind of beauty and a different kind of life and a different kind of purpose.

00:47:26.700 | Well, on this topic of self-hate, we've covered a lot of ground and we must end.

00:47:30.700 | Any final thoughts to leave us with?

00:47:33.700 | I would hope that people who do struggle would know in the first place that this is a really common struggle.

00:47:40.700 | They are not alone.

00:47:42.700 | There are often those self-hater can feel like everybody else because they put on a good face, not just on Facebook, but in church.

00:47:50.700 | Everybody else seems confident and happy and their life's going forward.

00:47:54.700 | It's often very surprising people who struggle profoundly with an inner voice that says, you know, you're just a horrible person.

00:48:03.700 | How can you call yourself a Christian?

00:48:05.700 | People must really hate you. You're not very good at making friends.

00:48:08.700 | It's a really common struggle and it has roots worth digging out because those roots about how our conscience works,

00:48:16.700 | they lead directly to the mercies of God and Christ in a way that can become very personal and very pointed.

00:48:24.700 | And that other voice that enters the debate is a voice of life and it can win the debate.

00:48:32.700 | It's a battle really worth fighting to seek to hear the other voice.

00:48:39.700 | It sure is. That was Dr. David Pallison, author of the new book launching in September titled Good and Angry,

00:48:45.700 | Redeeming Anger, Irritation, Complaining and Bitterness.

00:48:48.700 | It's coming out from New Growth Press. Check it out.

00:48:51.700 | Thank you for listening to this special extended weekend conversation on the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest David Pallison.

00:48:58.700 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will return on Monday with John Piper. We'll see you then.

00:49:02.700 | [end]

00:49:09.700 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Gospel Hope for Self-Haters

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