Free yourself from the false gospel of the fallen.

Nowhere in the Bible is it ever once taught that anyone is justified by self-negation.

We tend to speak and preach and teach as if this is the case – we speak of “selflessness” or “unselfishness” as if it is the very pinnacle of virtue and so define morality on those terms.

Both inside and outside of religion, we call things out as immoral or evil on the grounds of, “That’s selfish!” Conversely, it is considered good if it is perceived as “unselfish.” A typical Sunday-morning sermon might consist of calling upon believers to emulate Christ’s example of “self-sacrifice,” and so we are taught to evaluate our own moral quality by how much we give up for others’ sake, how much we efface ourselves, how willing we are to go without, deny ourselves, endure suffering, etc. Our “Christlikeness,” and therefore our standing before God, is measured by this criterion.

The Morality of the Unredeemed

This is the moral impulse of the fallen, though.

When the Man and Woman sinned in the Garden and “their eyes were opened,” they were immediately ashamed and so sought to cover themselves. They quite correctly understood their guilt – they understood their own selves to be the source of moral offense, and so they sought to hide themselves from the sight of God, to blot themselves out at the approach of His Presence. Because of their guilt, they understood their very selves to be moral obscenities unfit to be out in the open.

And they weren’t wrong. Shame is precisely the appropriate expression of guilt. It means the person is aware of his moral state. It is certainly a more honorable response than a shameless denial of guilt and prideful persistence in wrongdoing.  

But there is no benefit to staying there, and the Christian life is impossible from that mindset, because it is antithetical to the Christian life. A person who seeks to justify himself by blotting out the source of the moral offense will only ever experience the condemnation that his guilt deserves, no matter how unselfish, how self-sacrificing he is. He can never truly hide or cover himself, and the attempt will only ever bring about more shame and guilt, because it’s an impossible standard of conduct. Self-denial is burdensome – unbearably so. Morality, on those terms, is a tedious, joyless chore that brings no benefit to the person – it’s not supposed to, after all, because “that would be selfish.” But, a person has to find satisfaction and enjoyment somewhere, and if “morality” is seen as oppositional to that enjoyment, he’ll seek it on other-than-moral terms by illicitly gratifying his appetites and ego, and feel even more condemnation and hostility toward God in so doing. In all sincerity, he might continue to go to church, continue to worship and maintain a Christian identity, but with secret shame and guilt and the self-loathing that comes with it, because he can never be sufficiently unselfish to ever measure up.

This is the “mind governed by the flesh leading to death” that Paul described in Romans 7.

And, according to Paul, it’s a necessary step on the path to Life. But it is absolutely not the destination.

As Paul explained to the Roman Christians and as Jesus explained in the Sermon on the Mount, the Law was given precisely to awaken this shame that means awareness of our true moral state. But we aren’t supposed to live in that shame perpetually. The only good that shame and impulse to self-negation serves is to awaken us to our need for salvation. Romans 7 is the “before picture” to the “after picture” of Romans 8. In Romans 7, Paul is not describing the normative Christian life. He is describing the state of “the mind governed by the flesh leading to death” from which Christ came to save us. He is, quite explicitly, according to the text itself (and not any particular denomination or school of interpretation) describing the Christian’s state of mind prior to becoming a Christian, i.e., pre-salvation.

As in, to continue in that mindset means that a person is not saved, is not justified, because there is no justification in self-negation. Self-negation is the mind set on the flesh, leading to death.

And this not according to me. This is according to the apostle Paul.

The Mind Governed by the Spirit

Rather than self-negation, according to the Bible, we are justified by faith.

And faith is fundamentally, definitionally and ultimately self-serving.

“Faith” – according to both the Bible and to the normal, natural, common understanding of the word – is a question of self-interested investment in expectation of reward.

This is exactly the meaning of the word as Jesus used it.

Every invitation Jesus ever made to believe in him and follow him was predicated on an appeal to self-interest. At no point did Jesus ever say anything like, “Anyone who comes after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, and in so doing, be killed, then rejected by God and cast into hell … but you should still do it, because it’s the right thing to do – because it’s unselfish.”

No, he warned of suffering and death, but always on the promise that in the end, the rewards will infinitely outweigh the costs: “For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory, and he will reward each person according to what they have done.”

He typically characterized following him as a matter of wise, self-interested investment:

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” (Matthew 13:44-46)

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” Jesus said.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is cited as the basis for their faith – the proof of God’s astonishingly lavish promises to those who put their trust in Him through Christ. The apostles, therefore, called believers to strive and labor and commit themselves fully to the work of the gospel – not on the basis of any appeals to “unselfishness” or self-sacrifice as an end in itself, but with unblushing, unapologetic expectation of extravagant reward at Christ’s return: We will be made immortal, as he is. We will be glorified. We will reign with him. We are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. We are the princes of the universe. We will inherit creation itself and rule over it as God’s own sons and daughters.

If we trust God’s promises in Christ, we are justified. And by “trust His promises,” that doesn’t mean as a mere set of doctrinal positions to which we give assent. It means we believe our own ultimate wellbeing is to be found in Him – it means believing that God actually loves us and wants us to have and become and experience more joy and glory and love than we can even begin to imagine or hope for.

If we believe that, we are thereby justified: his blood covers our sins and blots out the moral obscenity of our guilt, and we are given a new Nature – His own. Shame is no longer appropriate, because the Self of which we were previously ashamed has been transformed into the likeness of Christ. We have no right to shame and guilt. If we have faith, we have only to strive to conform to our new Nature, on God’s promise that we have His qualities within us.

And in so doing, we are free to be selfish. Not merely free – we are commanded to indulge ourselves, without apology or reservation, because in transforming into his likeness, we now love what and whom he loves and hate what he hates. On the outside, this will appear to others as self-denial and self-sacrifice, but that is the paradox of love.

We read that it was “for the joy set before him” that Christ endured the cross, “scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Jesus did not sacrifice himself for the sake of sacrifice – because he was “unselfish” or “selfless.” He did it because he got something back that he regarded to be of greater value to himself than what he sacrificed – namely, us. That’s what “love” truly means.

Christ, and those who follow him, are not champions of the self-negation that so typically characterizes so-called “Christian” morality. Ironically, the genuine Christian is more akin to a hero in an Ayn Rand novel.

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute,” said Rand in her intro to “Atlas Shrugged.”

Tragically, Rand had little conception of where Man’s happiness could ultimately be found, because she rejected Christianity — at least, in the form that was familiar to her.

She was right to do so, albeit wrong in her final conclusions. The supreme irony is that her moral philosophy came closer to genuine Christianity than most of what we hear from the pulpit today.