Forget About Yourself

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Six Paths to Better Thoughts

C.S. Lewis describes it as the cheerful hallmark of humility. Tim Keller calls it the doorway into freedom. John Piper names it as the best friend of deep wonder. And we know it as one of earth’s most elusive gifts: self-forgetfulness.

Joy, true joy, does not live in the land of mirrors. Peace of mind is not found in our inner wells, no matter how deep we lower the pail of introspection. No personality test can usher the soul into contentment. Yes, we must know something of ourselves to live well in this world. But the healthiest people hardly consider what psychological categories they belong to, hardly care how they compare to others. They mainly forget about themselves and live.

I write these words less like Joshua in the promised land and more like Moses on Mount Nebo. I can see this Canaan of self-forgetfulness, but I do not yet dwell there. I have tasted the joys of that country like manna from heaven, like honey from the rock, and I long to leave this wilderness and join the saints whose joys are many and whose thoughts of self are few.

God alone can give this gift; he alone can mend a soul curved in on itself. But as we pray for him to lift us upward and outward, we can do something. To use an acronym, we can remember to FORGET.

• Fill your mind with Jesus.
• Obey more than you analyze.
• Repent and confess quickly.
• Get lost in something good.
• Embrace your God-given callings.
• Thank God always and for everything.

If you find yourself too focused on yourself, consider with me these six modest steps toward joyful self-forgetfulness.

1. Fill your mind with Jesus.

If you have ever told yourself to forget yourself, to stop thinking about yourself, you have also discovered the powerlessness of such a command. Self-forgetfulness happens indirectly: we don’t so much forget ourselves as remember something better. To tweak a phrase from Thomas Chalmers, we need the expulsive power of a new attention. And nothing warrants our attention more than Jesus Christ.

The Father commands us to listen to him (Matthew 17:5). The Spirit is given to glorify him (John 16:14). The apostles bid us to behold him (2 Corinthians 3:18; Hebrews 12:2). The angels never cease to worship him (Revelation 5:6–14). His riches are unsearchable; his glories, incomparable; the joys of those who love him, inexpressible (Ephesians 3:8; Hebrews 3:3; 1 Peter 1:8).

How, then, shall we fill our minds with him? In any of a hundred ways. An unsearchable Christ invites creative exploration — and the more we seek, the more we’ll find. Perhaps make Gospel reading a regular habit; consider always keeping a bookmark in these blessed stories. Or find rich, doxological books about the person and work of Jesus. Or get to know the loveliness of Christ through the meditations of Christ-saturated saints. Or become the kind of friend or spouse who frequently turns the conversation toward the Savior. However you do it, seek to make him your morning sun and evening star, your afternoon oasis, the joy of every hour.

“I am sure,” writes Samuel Rutherford, “the saints at their best are but strangers to the weight and worth of the incomparable sweetness of Christ.” And so, with him, make it your happiness “to win new ground daily in Christ’s love” (The Loveliness of Christ, 22, 27), to catch a new sight of him, to enjoy a new glory in him.

2. Obey more than you analyze.

Consider some familiar scenarios for the introspective. You just finished leading a Bible study, and now, on the drive home with your roommate, your mind replays half a dozen comments you made. Or while singing in corporate worship, you keep gauging your own emotions and comparing your demeanor to those around you. Or during dinner with your family, you go over a work project you just turned in, wondering if you should have done it differently.

In moments like these (and many others), self-analysis can feel so right, even so responsible. We don’t want to miss our mistakes and sins; we don’t want to remain strangers to ourselves. At the same time, however, we would do well to consider how self-analysis can lead us into subtle disobedience.

As long as you replay moments from the Bible study, you fail to love the roommate in the car with you. As long as you consider your own heart in worship, you fail to behold the Lord of the song. And as long as you critique and mentally redo the work project, you fail to offer your family your undivided presence. Even in solitude, when self-analysis doesn’t keep us from loving our neighbors, it often still distracts us from other kinds of obedience: doing our work, saying our prayers, getting our sleep, or thinking of the honorable and excellent and lovely (Philippians 4:8).

There is a place for self-analysis — for paying attention to ourselves, watching ourselves, and confessing our sins (Luke 17:3; 21:34; 1 John 1:9). But that place is not the dinner table or our kids’ bedside or our work desks or any other sphere where God has made our duty plain. There, he calls us to “look . . . to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4), speak a grace-filled word (Ephesians 4:29), work heartily as for him (Colossians 3:23).

So, when introspective thoughts intrude upon your mind, don’t assume that God expects you to heed them. Instead, ask, “Are these thoughts distracting me from more important obedience?” If so, tell your inner self, “I should perhaps think about that sometime soon, but right now I have a different job to do.” And then ask God for grace to do it.

3. Repent and confess quickly.

Imagine that you have spilled a bowl of cereal in your living room. But instead of cleaning it up right away, you go about your day with the milky mess on the floor. You keep catching glimpses of it; in the back of your head, you know it’s there. You have a vague sense that it might be damaging the floorboards, but still you carry on.

As ridiculous as this scenario sounds, many of us respond to sin similarly. Sometime in the morning, say, we made a thoughtless comment, or we shirked a plain duty, or we welcomed a twisted thought. We sinned. But instead of cleaning up the mess right away, instead of confessing the sin quickly, we linger. We keep stepping around the sin. And so we walk through a haze of vague guilt, background accusation, stumbling self-consciousness.

“Oh, what peace we often forfeit; oh, what needless pain we bear; all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer!” Do we not have an advocate in heaven (1 John 2:1)? Do we not have a Father whose heart grows warm toward his returning children (Luke 15:20)? Do we not have a gospel big enough for every sin we could bring?

Harboring guilt has no atoning power. Nor does God tell us to confess only after feeling awful through the afternoon. No, everything in him, everything in the gospel, everything in his word bids us to come now, right away. Respond to the first pang of guilt by saying, “I will go to my Father.” You really can sit down, confess your sin outright, receive forgiveness in Christ, and move on.

God promises that he forgets the sins he forgives (Hebrews 8:12). Surely that means we can forget them too. And in forgetting our sins, we might just forget ourselves.

4. Get lost in something good.

When was the last time you were rapt? The word refers to one of the most self-forgetful, and most pleasurable, experiences God gives. Those who are rapt, writes Winifred Gallagher, are “completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even ‘carried away’ . . . from the scholar’s study to the carpenter’s craft to the lover’s obsession” (The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 86). When we become rapt before some beauty, some hobby, some person, we lose ourselves — even if only for a few moments — and then find ourselves all the better for it.

Scripture gives us many examples of such holy fascination. Often, they come in the context of worship, as when David breathes after his “one thing” (Psalm 27:4) or Moses beholds the back of Glory (Exodus 33:21–23). Other times, however, the saints lose themselves in something God has made — from the four wonders of the wise man (Proverbs 30:18–19) to our Savior’s bird watching (Matthew 6:26) to the raucous song of Psalm 104.

When was the last time you were so engrossed, so blissfully lost? When was the last time you even found yourself in a context where you could be? Too many of us have gone far too long without a walk in the woods, without taking our seat at a true feast, without reading a book far more beautiful than it is “useful.” I know, as a father of three young boys, that life does not always allow much time for hobbies. But can we not embrace, at a minimum, the resolve of Clyde Kilby?

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

However busy you may be, find a way — some way — to regularly get lost in something good. We cannot simply manufacture such experiences; they are gifts. But we can place ourselves before the goodness of God in his good world. We can open our eyes. We can walk on some path of pleasure long enough to get lost.

5. Embrace your God-given callings.

For as self-reflective as I can be, I used to spend much more time poring over my soul. Look through my journals from former days, and you would find page upon page of agonizing introspection. But then you would see the entries slowly taper off until page after page of blank. Why? For several reasons, but one of the more significant is simply that I got busy. I found more friends. I took more (and harder) classes. I started working more hours. Empty evenings and solitary days gave way to good, God-given callings — a blessed kind of busyness, a friend of self-forgetfulness.

When dark thoughts lure us inward, when we feel ourselves falling into the vortex of self, what a gift to have a spouse to love, an infant to console, friends to serve, dishes to wash, neighbors to help, churches to build, work projects to accomplish, and other needs to meet. Such callings give a glorious objectivity to our days. As one introspective man, a new father, told me recently, “When my daughter needs me, God doesn’t expect me to be doing anything else.”

By all means, avoid the kind of devilish hurry that leaves no room for quiet mornings before God, calm moments through the day, leisurely Sabbath-like rests. But by all means, get a few big callings in life — and then hear in them the voice of God saying, “Husband, love your wife” (Ephesians 5:25), “Mother, train up your toddler” (Proverbs 22:6), “Friend, stir up your brother” (Hebrews 10:24), “Christian, meet the needs of the saints” (Romans 12:13). In short, hear in them the voice of God calling you out of yourself.

6. Thank God always and for everything.

Finally, however self-conscious and inward you feel, resolve to thank God “in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18), “always and for everything” (Ephesians 5:20).

Morbid introspection and Godward gratitude work against each other. The one takes us deep underground; the other lifts our eyes to a big and bright sky. The one curves us inward; the other bends us outward. The one sends us into a hall of mirrors, where we see ourselves and yet so often become deceived about ourselves; the other fills our thoughts with the Father of lights, our good and giving God (James 1:17).

Philippians 4:6–7 traces the way from anxious introspection to a mind and heart at peace:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

We turn from inward anxiety not only by casting our cares on God, but by doing so “with thanksgiving.” For thanksgiving puts us in a place far broader than our burdens, where we see a past filled with God’s faithfulness and a future alive with his promises — the cross behind us and heaven before us. Thanksgiving snaps us back to reality, speaking a gospel louder than our inward thoughts.

Under the old covenant, the Levites “were to stand every morning, thanking and praising the Lord, and likewise at evening” (1 Chronicles 23:30). As children of the new covenant, can we not (at least) match this godly practice? What if we hailed the morning and crowned the evening with gratitude? What if, at least twice a day, we turned around to notice the many gifts God has given, the goodness and mercy chasing us home (Psalm 23:6)? We might find that thanksgiving can become a stairway out of our inward cellar, a remembrance of God that helps us forget ourselves.

So, seek to fill your mind with Jesus. Obey more than you analyze. Repent and confess quickly. Get lost in something good. Embrace your God-given callings. And however stuck you feel inside yourself, thank God always and for everything.