John Walt

The greatest battle each of us must face is the battle to defeat ourselves. The world we have been baked in our entire lives tells us that we deserve to have what we want when we want it. The average person is hit with 5-10K marketing messages a day. Most of them we don’t even notice because of how many are coming at us, we have developed selective attention. So marketers work harder and harder to make us notice theirs amidst the sea of ads floating past our subconscious every day. And yet many of them do work, and most of them are telling us what we want to hear. Some version of the same old lie that we have been drawn to for all of human history. “You deserve to have what you want when you want it.” It doesn’t always say it explicitly, but often it does. You deserve a diamond ring, a new car, a day at the spa, a bigger house, a vacation, and my personal favorite, a better boat.

Almost all marketing, sales, and influencing is designed to play on weaknesses in human psychology. I think it's evil, but let's be honest, it's so commonplace now that it has become the new norm. How many of these thousands of messages are actually for our good? Have you ever gotten to the checkout page and seen a message saying, “Are you sure you can afford this right now?” or “Are you sure you really need this item?” Of course not, the companies selling those things don’t care what you need or can afford, they want to make the sale and are usually working behind the scenes to improve their checkout flow and adding conversion triggers to make sure you actually buy it. The point of all this is to say we should never trust messages coming from people who are trying to convince us to buy something. And the message they are all saying is “you deserve to have this because you want it.” So let's agree to at least be skeptical that there is any truth to that message, despite how good it sounds.

The problem with this lie is that it doesn’t just show up when it comes to buying stuff. It shows up in a million sneaky ways all the time. It's so bad that we can’t actually recognize it most of the time. I have this picture in my mind of a thin bridge leading over a giant lake. The lake is called self-obsession, and the bridge is called dying to self. There are seemingly infinite ways to be self-obsessed and only one way to die to self. We can serve our communities, lead our churches, love our families, and give to those in need, all while being deeply self-obsessed. I remember Jesus' words about how the road to life is narrow and few find it. I think the reason so few find it is because it is so easy to recycle self-obsession and not know we have done it.

For instance, many people achieve spectacular careers gratifying their own lust for success and wealth. Then, as they get older, they take their status and wealth and become obsessed with impact. Their large-scale do-goodery (my word for all things that seem like they are good to do but may actually be pointless) is often just another form of self-obsession. They achieve status and financial security, so now they want another type of gratification, what my grandfather used to call psychic income. Which is the reward a person feels when they do something for someone else. I love this concept and appreciate all the incredible things my grandfather did for others, but we have to stop and say we cannot do good things for others for ourselves, because while it may seem holy, it is just recycled self-gratification. The real question isn’t what we do, it's why we do it, and that is a question of the heart.

There is no substitution for dying to self. It cannot be done sometimes, part-time, or for a short time. It’s a complete commitment to let go of our belief that we are entitled to anything. Our life is not our own, and the purpose of our lives is to play our part in a much bigger story.

Killing off self-obsession is not the same as self-punishment or self-hatred. Unfortunately, in religious communities, it is very common for people to end up despising themselves in the pursuit of holiness. What we are talking about is stepping down from the throne of our life and deciding that our life is not about us. Then we walk that narrow path and see what God does. As we continually choose dying to self, it is small decisions in everyday things that lead to big changes over the years and decades.

Many religious communities approach sin with fear and, therefore, focus on issues of morality rather than the core issue of self-obsession. When we approach sin from the perspective of morality and accepted vs. condemned behavior, then we get to ignore the real issue. You can be just as self-obsessed doing something good as you can doing something bad. It's all an issue of the heart and whether we are still sitting on the throne of our lives. We spend so much time debating issues of right and wrong behavior that we completely miss the most important question of all: “What do I actually deserve?”

Scott Dohner used to often say to me, “We deserve nothing.” This statement felt extreme and unnecessary at first. But over years of pondering this, it has become a very helpful principle to keep in mind. I don’t deserve nothing because I am such a bad person. I deserve nothing because to believe that I deserve anything is to have the whole narrative wrong, and when that narrative is wrong, it's like a virus in the computer that makes the whole system turn on itself.

Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. Healthy selflessness looks like this. It’s not self-judgment, because that is still just making the story about us. It’s taking all of who we are and loving God with it and then loving others as much as we love ourselves. I believe that these two commandments are like the compass that keeps us walking straight across that bridge without going too deep into the lake of self-obsession. When we inevitably slip, they quickly guide us back to the bridge of life.

It seems that one of the biggest things that derails people in their transformation journey is when they don’t recognize that they are recycling self-obsession. I have been reminded of this myself many times over the last few weeks. I have discovered little places where I have hidden my self-obsession that seem pretty reasonable, but they were just a new version of the old trap.

For instance, I love mountain biking and have gotten to ride at some of the best parks and trail systems in the country. Five years ago, I decided I wanted to get serious about it and try to achieve a level of skill where I could ride black diamond enduro and downhill lines all over the world. My struggle has been that it is hard to do the kind of riding where I live in Texas. I would often pray about this, wondering how I am going to get as good as I want while living in Texas. The last couple of months, I have been praying the prayers from the Courageous Prayers Note (No. 18). The last few weeks, I found myself feeling very differently about mountain biking. I found myself thinking that I don’t need to ride crazy trails or achieve some skill level, but I can just enjoy riding. I discovered that I had taken a part of my drive for success and hidden it in a sport that I love. I repented and gave my mountain biking to God. The cool thing was that God surprised me. We went to Whistler, BC last week as a family, and for the first time, I was able to just ride for fun with my kids, and I was blown away to see how much they loved it. I couldn’t pull them off the pump tracks for three days. I thought how funny that I surrendered something I love, and then God blessed me with my family falling in love with the sport. Now, instead of mountain biking being something that takes me away from the family, it can be something that we do together. Clearly, I can’t ride black diamond with my kids right now, but with less of my self-obsession in the mix, I found that I didn’t really care what trails we rode. I was just glad to be on the bike with the people I love.

This may seem like a small example, and in some ways it is, but I have seen God do the same thing in so many areas of my life, from my career to my relationship with Heather and the Kids. In big ways and small ways, I find that the path of dying to self-obsession is the path to freedom and fulfillment. But we aren’t taught that, and all the messages we hear every day don’t validate that. Instead, the lie is repeated over and over again in a million different ways. Please join me in praying this simple prayer.

Prayer

I do not deserve to have what I want when I want it. God, I repent for the places in my heart and mind that I believe that I do. I ask you to show me those places in me where self-obsession reigns. I surrender those places to you and ask you to reign and sit on the throne in every area of my life. I thank you that true freedom, life, and fulfillment are found following you on the path of dying to my self-obsession. God, I want to love you with all my heart, mind, and soul and to love others as I love myself.

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