“For one look at yourself, take ten looks at Christ!”

This memorable line from Robert Murray M‘Cheyne (1813–1843) has drawn many Christians out of the cellar of morbid introspection. Some of us once lived in that cellar — bent down double, curved concave, scrutinizing, analyzing, paralyzing. For every one look at Christ, we took ten at self.

But then the Spirit began to unbend us, convex us. He sent a friend, gave us a passage, or perhaps used M‘Cheyne’s famous line to lift us up and out to Christ. Self-scrutiny gradually gave way to Christ-scrutiny. We dared to believe that taking ten looks at him was better and safer than taking ten looks within. So, we looked and looked and looked — ten times and more.

I have no desire to discourage such “looking to Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2). At the same time, however, I do wonder if M‘Cheyne’s quote has sometimes been taken in ways he didn’t quite intend. We might read his counsel and think he gave little or no place to introspection — that he countered every inward turn with “Christ! Look to Christ!” And so we might strive for the same attitude.

But for all of M‘Cheyne’s remarkable Christ-centeredness, the man was not afraid to examine himself, and often with surprising rigor. In fact, M‘Cheyne believed that the right kind of introspection could actually serve his sight of Christ. He knew that one good look at self has the potential to make our ten looks at Christ all the sweeter, stronger, and more wonderfully specific.

Godly introspection is a road, not a room, that ever takes us to the same glorious place: Jesus. And as we learn from M‘Cheyne, some of the best sights of Christ come at the end of that road.

One Look Within

“I am persuaded that I ought to confess my sins more,” M‘Cheyne wrote near the end of his life. “I think I ought at certain times of the day — my best times — say, after breakfast and after tea — to confess solemnly the sins of the previous hours, and to seek their complete remission.” He goes on, “I ought to take all methods for seeing the vileness of my sins” (Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne, 150).

Those who have felt trapped in the prison of introspection may tremble at such words; we may hear in them the clink of former chains. We might also wonder, Is this really the same man who told us to take ten looks at Christ — the same man who said, “Do not take up your time so much with studying your own heart as with studying Christ’s heart” (279)? Yes, the same man. He treated the command to “keep a close watch on yourself” with utter seriousness (1 Timothy 4:16).

We might imagine that such precise self-examination would leave M‘Cheyne feeling like a constant spiritual failure. But remarkably, it didn’t. Those who read his biography find a man often exuberant with joy, regularly relaxing in God’s love. “Oh, how sweet to work all day for God, and then to lie down under his smiles!” he wrote in his journal (56). His looks at self did not steal his sense of God’s steadfast favor.

How? Well, for one, M‘Cheyne was aware not only of indwelling sin but of indwelling grace; when he looked within, he could notice the ways his life pleased God. But even more significantly, he grasped that seeing self (even the worst parts of himself) was not an end but a means of seeing Christ more clearly, of beholding his glories more intimately and particularly. And so he surrounded his self-examination and confessions of sin with celebrations of Jesus.

Ten Sweeter, Stronger Looks

We need not follow M‘Cheyne’s precise regimen of self-examination in order to learn from his Christ-focused pattern. Scripture doesn’t tell us how often we should confess our sins or how rigorously we should examine ourselves. We will need to find our own way under the guidance of the Spirit and in community with God’s people.

But however often or deeply we consider ourselves, how might our one look at self serve our ten looks at Christ?

1. Make introspection a road, not a room.

For some Christians, introspection leads to paralyzed inaction. Our look within becomes a locked sight, a fixed gaze — a room rather than a road. M‘Cheyne, for all of his inward intensity, speaks of self-examination in dramatically different terms. Yes, he sought to see “the vileness of [his] sins,” and to that end he examined himself carefully (150). But once he saw himself clearly, he did not linger long. He flew to Jesus.

At one point, M‘Cheyne uses the image of the prodigal son among the pigs. He knew how tempting it could feel to sit in his guilt, letting his inward look extend, not daring “to go straight from the swine-trough to the best robe.” But this suggestion, he said, is a lie “direct from hell.” “I am sure that there is neither peace nor safety from deeper sin, but in going directly to the Lord Jesus Christ. This is God’s way of peace and holiness” (151). And so he resolved to let no guilt “hinder me from fleeing to Christ” (152). Rather, he let his guilt drive him to God.

“Godly introspection is a road, not a room, that ever takes us to the same glorious place: Jesus.”

By definition, self-examination and confession require a careful inward look; they call us to know and feel the sicknesses of our soul. But they equally call us not to remain there. In confession, we are like the woman with the flow of blood — knowing our disease, yes, but allowing that knowledge to send our feet striding and hands reaching for the Healer (Mark 5:27–29). As M‘Cheyne’s friend Horatius Bonar wrote, “Complaints against self, which do not lead the complainer directly to the cross, are most dangerous” (Think Again, 107).

Done well, inward looking leads us to the Lord outside ourselves, the Christ worth beholding with tenfold attention. But what exactly do we behold about Christ at the end of this road? How does our inward look draw out glories we wouldn’t have seen otherwise — or would have seen less clearly? M‘Cheyne describes this sight of Christ in terms of both cleansing and clothing, or washing and wearing.

2. Wash from the infinite fountain.

Consider first the cleansing. When we bring our sins to Jesus, we approach an infinite fountain overflowing with the worth of Christ’s suffering. “In Christ’s bloodshedding,” M‘Cheyne writes, “there is an infinite over-payment for all my sins. Although Christ did not suffer more than infinite justice demanded, yet he could not have suffered at all without laying down an infinite ransom” (151).

M‘Cheyne names some of the sins he felt tempted to consider “too great, too aggravated, too presumptuous” for full, free, immediate forgiveness: “as when done on my knees, or in preaching, or by a dying bed, or during dangerous illness” (152). Does God readily forgive such evils upon sincere confession? Can we bring not just small sins but Goliath-sins to him? He does, and we can.

Hate your sins, renounce your sins, and resolve to forsake your sins. But do not fear to look your sins full in the face. Do not hesitate to call them what they are. The larger they seem, the larger Christ seems when he forgives them. The worse they appear, the worthier he appears when he covers them. “If we confess our sins” — whatever sins — “[God] is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

We can bring no sin Christ cannot cleanse. And however often we draw from these waters, they remain ever full. So, come wash in the infinite fountain.

3. Wear his many-colored robe.

After the cleansing comes the clothing. “I must not only wash me in Christ’s blood,” M‘Cheyne writes, “but clothe me in Christ’s obedience” (152). And here we get to the heart of how our inward-looking shapes our sight of Christ. M‘Cheyne goes on,

For every sin of omission in myself, I may find a divinely perfect obedience ready for me in Christ. For every sin of commission in self, I may find not only a stripe or a wound in Christ, but also a perfect rendering of the opposite obedience in my place, so that the law is magnified, its curse more than carried, its demand more than answered. (152)

The “robe of righteousness” Christ gives is not generic (Isaiah 61:10). Like Joseph’s many-colored coat, Christ’s robe has every shade of splendor for our every shade of sin. Whatever our misery, he has an excellency to outmatch it. Every guilt finds an opposite glory in him.

For example, lately I have found myself feeling indignant at interruptions and demands upon my time. But then one morning in Mark 6, as an unrelenting crowd disrupted Jesus’s desired rest, I read this: “When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them” (Mark 6:34). Where I am affronted and offended, Christ bleeds mercy. I saw my selfishness in that moment, yes, but I also saw a robe woven with Christ’s own compassion — a robe to wear by faith and to increasingly embody by grace.

And so with every single sin. For our barbed words he has his own bridled tongue, and for our apathy his mighty zeal, and for our bitterness his tender grace, and for our impatience his slow-to-anger love. So, while sin can show us parts of ourselves we feel dismayed to see, sin can also show us parts of Christ we feel thrilled to behold. For our darkness cannot help but show his light — his many-splendored, perfect light, shining from every facet of his spotless human life.

His Unsearchable Riches

To be clear, M‘Cheyne’s ten looks at Christ did not all spring from his self-examination. He spent many hours in simple self-forgetful study, marveling at “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8). But he also knew how to make introspection a means of seeing those riches more clearly.

By all means, then, take ten looks at Christ for every one look at self. Focus not so much on studying your heart as on studying Christ’s heart. But also do take that one look at yourself — and let it inform and shape those ten looks. And let what you see of your own heart show you the worth and beauty of his.

We might dismiss the first marriage as too extraordinary to be practically helpful. How could any ordinary sinful husband or wife today relate to those truly innocent newlyweds, with their perfect home in a flawless paradise? They enjoyed a fullness of peace and security and intimacy that’s now alien to the earth we’ve known.

Even for Adam and Eve, however, the honeymoon phase didn’t last long (at least when measured in verses). And we learn as much (or more) from their later failures as we do from their early obedience. As a young, often-failing husband, I find my imagination captured by the only sinless husband in history laying all he had on the altar of sin and compromise. His failures are foils of my callings, strange and dark inroads into what my marriage was meant to be — into what I was meant to be. His failures press our vague and comfortable ideas of what it means to be a husband into higher, less comfortable definition.

The more years I’m married, the more easily I can put myself in Adam’s fig leaves. His sins are unique for being the first, but they’re not all that different in kind or consequence. As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to be a bad husband than a faithful one, even in paradise. So what might we learn from that first bad husband? We’ll study their marital collapse in three stages.

When Temptation Came

The first verses in the single-most tragic chapter in Scripture don’t even mention the man. As a result, we might be led to think Adam was simply a supporting actor (perhaps even a victim) in this awful story. The reality, however, is that his seeming absence was his first great failure.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)

Satan knew how to attack a marriage. He knew that the surest way to undo the man, the marriage, and their brilliant mural of God and his people was to target the wife and seek to reverse the order of their callings. He undermines their matrimony by encouraging her to be the assertive head and him the yielding helper. So he goes after the bride. And where was Adam?

As we continue reading, we realize the husband was not, in fact, absent, but stood by quietly. In the same moment of temptation, he commits two of the most common sins of men: he fails to do what needs to be done (passivity), and he does what ought never be done (compromise). Notice how he finally enters the scene:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

Passivity

Adam was not off gathering food or herding lions while Satan snuck in to deceive Eve; he was there with her. His wife didn’t grab some fruit and run off to find him; she simply turned and held out her hand. He didn’t need her to relay all that was said; he likely heard every word. And yet he let her listen, and take, and eat. His home fell by a poisonous passivity. While it was Eve who listened (1 Timothy 2:14), who took what was not hers, and who prepared the forbidden meal, Adam stood by and let it all happen.

Just a few verses earlier, in Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man” — the man, not the couple — “and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” — to guard it, preserve it, protect it. Jason DeRouchie unpacks this keeping: “[The husband] is to supply spiritual and physical food, and to ward off any spiritual or physical obstacles to the glory-filled global mission to which God called his family.” But when temptation came to his home, Adam failed to keep what God had entrusted to him. Instead of intervening, he tolerated and made room for him.

What kept Adam from stepping in and speaking up? We’re not told. I assume, however, that his temptations weren’t so different from the ones husbands like me face today. Perhaps it was pride. That’s certainly the weakness Satan aimed for: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Perhaps it was fear, wondering what Eve might feel or say if he refused the fruit. Perhaps it was sloth, simply lacking the strength and resolve to resist and fight back. Perhaps it was a lust for power, longing to taste that one forbidden pleasure. Passivity grows in any number of soils, but as we see again and again, it always bears the same bitter fruit.

Compromise

Adam wasn’t entirely passive, though. The three most haunting words, at least for husbands, might be these: “. . . she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.”

The husband not only watched as his wife made war on God, but he grabbed a sword of his own. He knew full well what God had said. Again, just a few verses earlier, we read, “The Lord God commanded the man” — the man, not the couple — “saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16–17). And yet he ate. The deceitfulness of sin made him deaf to the voice that had brought him from dust and breathed life into his lungs. Is anything more destructive and painful to a home than when a husband, who manifestly knows better, dives headlong into sin?

“The surest way for a man to protect the home around him is for him to guard the heart within him.”

And how many homes have crumbled because husbands failed to see temptation for what it is and call sin what it is? The surest way for a man to protect the home around him is for him to guard the heart within him. As husbands, we follow in the footsteps of the Bridegroom, who met Satan and his temptations in the wilderness after forty lonely, hungry days and yet would not bite. Not when the devil tried the same old line, “Did God actually say . . . ?” Not when he was hungry. Not for the glory of a hundred nations.

Our homes and churches need husbands and fathers who refuse to abandon God’s word, even if their wives, children, and friends come to lead them away.

After Sin Happened

After Adam and Eve ate from the tree and fell into sin and shame, the Lord came calling, and when he did, he came first, as we should expect, for the husband.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:8–9)

When God asks him what happened, Adam shifts the blame everywhere but himself, even casting accusations back at God. “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). She gave me the fruit, and you gave her to me, so who could blame me?

I imagine any man who’s been married for long can relate to the seduction of self-pity — wanting to preserve our name and honor while the house is on fire. How deceitful is sin if we can be convinced to blame God for sin? And yet Adam does. And we do, in our own ways. We feel bad for ourselves about this or that and begin to make excuses for our failures.

The point was not that Eve should take no blame (to her credit, she owns her part, verse 13); the point was that Adam should take the first and greater blame. He, not she, was called to keep. Faithful husbands step up and take responsibility in crisis and defeat. They don’t go looking for excuses or scapegoats. They know that judgment always begins with the head of the home. So they first remove whatever they can find in their own eyes (Matthew 7:5), and then they do all in their power to correct, restore, and protect the family. When sin happens in the home, the husband takes responsibility — not meaning he accepts all blame, but that he accepts his part of the blame and then, more importantly, owns how the family responds to it.

If Satan can convince a husband that his marital problems are all rooted in her sins, he’s removed the walls of their home and opened them to all manner of spiritual attack. Yes, the woman, not the man, was deceived, but Scripture says sin entered the world through the man, not the woman (Romans 5:12).

Before Temptation Came?

We can’t say much about the space and time between the last verse of Genesis 2 — “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” — and the first verses of Genesis 3 — “Now the serpent . . . said to the woman” (Genesis 3:1–2). Had Adam already failed by letting Satan in at all? We don’t know how the devil invaded the garden or how he got an audience with its queen. We do know that God had charged the king to keep — to forbid and withstand all threats.

However Satan slipped in, we know that keeping a marriage and home in a world like ours, corrupted by sin and brimming with temptation, begins well before temptation comes. We know that many temptations can be avoided altogether because Jesus teaches us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation” (Matthew 6:13) — not just lead us through temptation, but keep us from it altogether. Don’t let his awful lies touch our ears. Husbands and fathers are one great means to this kind of protection. We make sacrifices to stand on the spiritual walls of our homes, monitoring the unique threats and needs that emerge in our marriages and parenting, and then taking decisive, costly action when they do.

“Being a husband means standing guard before serpents come.”

How many husbands today, like Adam, have lowered our guards and let temptation invade and live freely in our homes? How often have we let Satan’s lies go unchallenged — or worse, undetected? Being a husband means standing guard before serpents come.

Proactive Protection

This keeping, however, means not only keeping evil out of the home, but kindling and cultivating good within it. Spiritual protection always involves teaching and encouragement.

Guardians of the home don’t just stand on the wall, scanning the horizon for shadows; they also fill the walls with light. They know that a family’s best defense is a deepening and expanding joy in God, that some of the best keeping happens through consistently reading, sharing, praying, marveling, serving, and singing. After all, Adam and Eve didn’t eat because they got hungry, but because their eyes had grown dim toward God. John Piper says,

Swallowing forbidden fruit is bad. But it is not the essence of what happened here. The moral outrage — the horror — of what happened here was that Adam and Eve desired this fruit more than they desired God. They delighted more in what the fruit could be for them than in what God could be for them. Eating was not the essence of the evil because, before they ate, they had already lost their taste for God. He was no longer their all-supplying life and joy. They preferred something else. That is the ultimate essence of evil. (“The Ultimate Essence of Evil”)

Part of a husband’s charge to guard the home, then, is to do what he can to foster the kind of delight in God that gladly rejects whatever Satan offers. Joy guards our wives and children from temptation and delivers them from evil.

Husbands, we have a high and weighty calling — and with it, a higher and stronger God to help in time of need. Like Adam, we’ll inevitably fail as husbands. Unlike Adam, we now know where to find forgiveness for our failures and the daily strength to love our wives and families faithfully. So when temptation comes, we step in and defy Satan head on, taking as much of his fire as we can. After sin happens, we take responsibility before God and lead the family in sorrow, confession, and repentance. And before temptation comes, we keep a big, satisfying vision of God before our families — through family worship, through informal conversations, and perhaps most of all, through our own contagious joy in him.

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