At the end of the day God gets all the glory. But we need to keep striving to become who we should be: those who can take wholesome pride and satisfaction in our work and service, but who also above all else seek the praise of God, and do not worry overly much about what others think of us.

The topics covered here need to be approached carefully and prayerfully, but they do need to be discussed. And perhaps I should preface my remarks by this disclaimer: I am not a counsellor nor a pastor nor a therapist nor a psychologist. I am however a committed Christian who is very much interested in what follows.
The main theme of this piece is that we need the biblical balance when it comes to how we think of ourselves. We were told by Jesus that we are to ‘love our neighbour as our self’ (Mark 12:31). So there is a place for self-love, properly considered.
But so much of the direction in many current Christian circles is an overemphasis on self-esteem, feeling good about yourself, affirming yourself, and having a great self-image. That too needs to be balanced with the many passages that command us to deny our self, to crucify the flesh, to put off the old man, and so on.
And much of this discussion also involves the issue of whether we are first and foremost men-pleasers or God-pleasers. Do we seek above all the praise and attention of others, or of God? We know that ‘the fear of man brings a snare’ (Proverbs 29:25), but how many believers fear man more than they fear God?
As I say, we need to get the right balance here, but in my view much of the Western church today is far too fixated on self and self-worth, and too little concerned about pleasing God in all things. So let me tease this out a bit more.
The American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) developed a hierarchy of seven needs. It was a way to assess psychological health. The bottom two have to do with basic needs such as food, shelter, safety, etc. The 3rd and 4th have to do with things like love, belonging, esteem, competency, being recognised, etc.
There is some truth here, and if you have a lousy self-image or zero self-esteem, your life can certainly spiral out of control. So even secular counsellors and psychologists will work with people in these areas, and they can offer some much-needed help to people. But the Christian knows that there must be spiritual and biblical dimensions added to the equation as well.
The idea of simply feeling good about yourself, loving yourself and never criticising yourself is hardly biblical. But believing that I am nothing and my feelings and attitudes and so on do not matter at all can also be unhelpful. So we must get things right here. And as part of this, we must realise that we are all at different places in our journey.
Many Christians need to learn what saying no to self really means. They may well need, for the first time in their lives, to really learn what the denial of self entails, and why it is so important. But other folks are so beaten down, bruised and bummed out, that they will need help in the other direction.
Let me wax autobiographical here for a moment. For pretty much all of my life I have had a poor self-image and low sense of self-worth. Therefore for much of my life I have often sought the approval, attention and recognition of others. (Even as I write this, I am wondering what others will think of me!)
So I need to work on getting the mix right here. I need to know of God’s love for me and why he highly values me. But I also need to move away from being worried about what others think of me. God’s reputation should be my main concern, and it will take God’s grace to help me break free from some of the ruts I might be in.
Learning how to get all this in its proper place is an ongoing task. We too easily swing to extremes here. But as mentioned, for many in the Western church today, learning to say no to self may be the biggest need of the hour. And many great saints can help us out here. Let me mention just three of them.
Kerry, a friend of mine, made this helpful social media post a year or so ago:
William Wilberforce struggled with wanting the approval of man as we all often do. This prayer in his journal from 1811 made me think of the social media world where it is so easy to fall into the trap of depending on the comments of others for building us up. Yes, it is nice to receive encouragement and building up from our friends, but we need to be sure we are not depending on it and seeking it over and above our dependence on and being approved by God through Christ.
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Just as the seeker-sensitive movement made many professing Christians vulnerable to the emerging church 15 years ago, the social justice movement today is making many professing Christians vulnerable to deconstructing their faith.

The first people to deconstruct their faith were not young people in America—they weren’t people dissatisfied with American Christianity. The first people to deconstruct their faith were people in the Garden of Eden—they were people dissatisfied with God.
Adam and Eve are the first people to deconstruct their faith.
People deconstruct their faith when they’re dissatisfied with their faith—when they’re dissatisfied with God: and it always ends in disaster.
People who deconstruct their faith destroy their faith, and they destroy their souls.
Deconstruction is essentially just a fancy word for doubt. People who deconstruct their faith are people who doubt their faith. When people say they’re deconstructing their faith, they’re just using a pretentious phrase to say they’re doubting what God says in the Bible.
Actually, it’s worse than that. People who deconstruct their faith are not merely doubting or struggling with their faith: they are dismissing their faith. They are dismissing Biblical truth.
Deconstructionism is an approach to critiquing literature and beliefs. People who deconstruct their faith critique the Bible (literature) and beliefs (Christian theology).
Specifically, deconstructionism is a postmodern concept that expands on Nietzsche’s theory that there’s “there is no such thing as facts, just interpretations.”
Therefore people who deconstruct their faith believe there is no such thing as Biblical truth, just interpretations—interpretations mostly dominated by supposedly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic white people who—according to deconstructionists—preach American or Western Christianity as the only correct interpretation or version of Christianity.
In postmodernism, deconstructionism is a strategic approach to critiquing and attacking Western philosophy as an oppressive philosophy designed by Europeans to manipulate people into accepting harmful ideas as truth.
In the same way, people who deconstruct their faith critique and attack (Western) Christianity as an oppressive theology designed by Europeans to manipulate people into accepting harmful ideas as Biblical truth.
This is why deconstructionists tend to call themselves exevangelicals instead of ex-Christians. They believe evangelicalism is Western Christianity—not real Christianity.
So just as postmodernists attack Western philosophy, people who deconstruct their faith primarily attack (Western) Christianity.
Deconstructionists believe Christianity—or specifically, Western Christianity—was constructed by ignorant and oppressive white men—not God. Therefore according to them, (Western) Christianity needs to be deconstructed or destroyed.
For that reason, when people say they’re deconstructing their faith, it means they’re critiquing and attacking doctrines they believe have been constructed to harm others—doctrines like the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the divinity and exclusivity of Jesus, complementarianism, Christian sexual ethics, justice, and more.
Meaning, when people say they’re deconstructing their faith—they’re simply repeating what Satan said to Eve in the Garden of Eden: “Did God actually say…?”
When Satan said to Eve, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1), he was attempting to deconstruct her faith. He was craftily suggesting Eve had misinterpreted God’s words.
Then when Eve said to him God said they shouldn’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or they’ll die—Satan suggested God was oppressing and manipulating Adam and Eve in order to keep them from becoming enlightened or “woke” about his harmful lies about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Satan said: “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5).
Does that sound familiar? Deconstructionists suggest we Christians do not want other Christians to deconstruct their faith because we don’t want them to become enlightened or woke to Western Christianity’s supposedly harmful interpretations and lies about sexuality, social justice, salvation, and scripture.
Deconstructionists, clearly, haven’t stumbled on a new phenomenon—Satan is the founder of deconstructionism. Adam and Eve became the first people to deconstruct their faith when they became dissatisfied with God’s words and believed Satan’s lies.
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Written by Erika J. Ahern |
Monday, October 31, 2022
We make a promise in marriage that offers unconditional love to one person and the children that come from that union: we say “you can place your happiness in my hands.” In that moment, both you and all your dependents are inextricably linked by your own choice until death. No amount of re-imagining your life will change the fact: you will never be fulfilled personally until you have fulfilled your vow. We don’t understand the vow when we make it, but it hangs in our hearts as an immovable lodestar.

Just after Christmas 2021, Honor Jones, a senior editor at the Atlantic, published “How I Demolished My Life: A Home-Improvement Story.” It’s a self-portrait of a mother who, while wrangling with kitchen renovation plans, decides she doesn’t want a new kitchen.
She wants a divorce.
Jones spends the next three thousand perfectly manicured words trying to justify her decision to break up her family. She displays all the self-congratulatory bravado of middle-aged white women who read Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House or Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray for a high school literature class and then imagine themselves forever in the role of Brave Protestor of Victorian Oppression.
Jones describes her marriage, which produced three children who are still young, as her cage. Her imperfect suburban home is, to her, an icon of her imprisonment.
She doesn’t like the “chaos” of her house and, even with the help of sensible Luba, her hired cleaning woman, she finds the lived-in quality of a home with children irksome.
“[T]he crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet.”
So she tells her husband she’s divorcing him. She loves him, she really does. He gave her everything she’d asked for. But it wasn’t enough.
“I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself.”
She seems to think she has now suddenly come to herself: only by breaking free and feeling “cold wind on my face” will she be herself again.
So they move their three children into a large apartment in New York City (the city is “better for our careers”). She and her husband alternate staying with the kids and camping out in a smaller, one-bedroom apartment that they can afford. She sells their Pennsylvania home, folds her husband’s sport coats for the last time, and ruminates on the deep mysteries of self-actualization.
Jones is a gifted writer. She applies all her considerable talent in the art of rhetoric, but only to showcase her utter failure in the art of self-knowledge.
All in all, she paints a vivid picture of what we might call a “good divorce.” She applies just the right measure of compunction and sincerity, as well as compassion for her children (whom she admits she’s deprived of their family).
The piece struck a nerve. It received pointed censure on the Atlantic’s Twitter feed and comment box, much of it along the lines of “you sad, pathetic, entitled woman” and “what about your children, you selfish pig.”
It’s unlikely a Twitter mob will ever change a heart or mind. And to be fair, we don’t know the real Honor Jones, who may be far more conflicted about her decision than the picture she has put forward. We can’t know what other factors in her life and marriage she has chosen not to share. The fact that such “brave,” “confessional” writing is encouraged, let alone celebrated as heroic and cathartic, tells us more about our society and its appetites than about the writer.
But the public response to the piece does get surprisingly close to the heart of the matter. Marriage was not the prison. Jones was terribly, tragically wrong, because her marriage was in fact her best means to finding herself. By jumping ship on her family, she abandoned the one vessel that could best carry her on her voyage of self-discovery: the life-long, exclusive commitment made in a marriage.
Self-knowledge is the key to the happy life. Greek philosophers inscribed the admonition “know thyself” over the entrance to the oracle at Delphi. Confucian and Daoist philosophers, in their distinct ways, call for self-awareness and self-cultivation.
We are a puzzle to ourselves, as Jones demonstrates. But she has swallowed the lie that only by breaking free of commitments and disappointments and the daily grind of life together will she find out who she really is. That daily grind is called “losing yourself,” and it hurts.
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