As I recounted my failures for the umpteenth time, my Christian counselor leaned toward me and gently asked, “Don’t you think it’s time to forgive yourself?” I’d been a Christian for decades by then, but in this one area, I was like Arthur Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter, constantly revisiting my sin with the scourge of memory. Crushed by the weight of spiritual perfectionism, I wanted to be enough on my own, and I failed.
I knew what my counselor meant by the question, but in the silence that followed, the Holy Spirit reminded me of David’s words in Psalm 32:5: “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.’”
So I uttered one surprising word in response: “No.” Aware of my counselor’s quizzical gaze, I added, “But I do think it’s time for me to accept God’s forgiveness.”
Test Cultural Refrains
The more I reflect on our conversation, the more I question the use of reflexive pronouns in spiritual vocabulary. Remember reflexive pronouns from elementary school? They signal that the sentence’s object is the same as its subject.
“Forgive yourself.” “Love yourself.” “Give yourself grace.”
These are common cultural refrains, but they’re not gospel anthems. While they may derive from the truth that we should recognize our God-given dignity and value as image-bearers, both in how we honor others and how we view ourselves, taken too far, these refrains wrongly encourage us to provide for ourselves things we ultimately need from God. As we test them against the gold standard of Scripture, we find them to be the fool’s gold of a culture infatuated with self.
‘Forgive Yourself’
In Psalm 32:1, David declares that blessing belongs to those whose “sin is covered.” We’re blessed when Christ’s blood covers our sins, but woe to us when we try to cover them on our own! When God covers our sin, it’s atonement; when we cover our sin, it’s deceit that leads to despair (vv. 2–4).
Even the Pharisees knew that God alone forgives sin (Luke 5:21). When we attempt to make forgiveness reflexive, we deny our dependence on Christ. We unwittingly believe the lie that we can atone for the sins we committed. Worse yet, we seek to enthrone ourselves in God’s place. The gospel teaches that we receive forgiveness by believing in Christ’s finished work (Acts 10:43). Either we receive forgiveness from God or we stand condemned.
Either we receive forgiveness from God or we stand condemned.
‘Love Yourself’
Scripture teaches us in no uncertain terms that self-love is a sign of the times (2 Tim. 3:2). And yet, calls for self-love abound even within Christian spaces. God is love. To know him is to be enveloped by the Trinity’s deep and personal delight. When we pursue reflexive self-love, we rob ourselves of relationship with Love himself.
Like forgiveness, love is a gift from God that we receive. Romans 5:5 says that “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” The point isn’t that we’d love ourselves; the point is that we’d love one another (John 15:12). As the Father has loved the Son, as the Son has loved us, and as the Spirit has filled us with the capacity to yield the fruit of this love, so we’re to love one another (v. 9; Gal. 5:22).
‘Give Yourself Grace’
What about the common quip that we all need to give ourselves a little more grace? When we hold this seemingly innocuous idea up to the piercing light of Scripture, we find it an impossible proposition. Sinful human beings have access to grace through Christ alone (Rom. 5:2). We can no more give ourselves grace than we can give ourselves CPR. We’re dead on arrival unless God breathes new life into us by his Spirit. If we need more grace, we need more of God. When we receive more grace, we receive it from the indwelling life of his Spirit, not from the “broken cisterns” of our own hearts (Jer. 2:13).
The “reflexive gospel” is the mistaken belief that we can unilaterally confer any of God’s benefits and blessings on ourselves. The reflexive gospel isn’t the gospel at all. It’s just another lie born out of human hearts curved inward—Augustine and Luther’s notion of homo incurvatus in se—a modern-day rendition of an age-old problem.
We can no more give ourselves grace than we can give ourselves CPR.
These refrains are the siren song of a serpent who “masquerades as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14, NIV). Listen again, and see if you hear the hiss of his deception: “Forgive yourself. Love yourself. Give yourself grace. You do it. Did God really say you need him for that?”
Reflective, Not Reflexive
The true gospel teaches us that God became human to do what no human being could do for herself. The true gospel teaches us that “his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness,” and we receive this sacred endowment “through the knowledge of him” alone (2 Pet. 1:3, emphasis added).
True Christianity is meant to be reflective, not reflexive.
With “unveiled face[s]”—uncovered faces, you might say—we stare into the depths of God’s glory, and he transforms us into his image “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). Only when we bare our sin before him, when we ditch the mirrors and the selfie sticks and we stare instead into the face of Glory himself, will his reflection begin to change us from the inside out.
Over time, as he transforms us, we begin to bear the fruit of his Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23). We begin to reflect his glory to the world around us. As reflections of him, mindful of the benefits we’ve received, we forgive one another, we love one another, and we point one another to the grace that “we have all received” in Christ (John 1:16). And, lest we forget, “it is no longer [we] who live, but Christ who lives in [us]” (Gal. 2:20).
The Gospel Coalition