In the podcast this week, we explored the guiding principle of resilience with writer and spiritual director Rusty McKie. We hope you enjoy this excerpt from his book, The Art of Stability.
Everything changes when you let Jesus love every part of you that you’d rather ignore.
The first change is you begin to show compassion to yourself. Here’s a truth worth pondering: if you offer less compassion to yourself than Jesus shows you, you don’t believe the love that God has for you” (I John 4:16).
Jesus isn’t angry when you battle trials, when emotions overwhelm you, when you don’t know the right thing to do, or even when you struggle to do it. As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. “For he knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust” Psalm 103:13-14.
Experiencing Jesus’s love gives birth to desperately needed self-compassion.
Because Jesus suffered with you in your humanness and sympathized with your weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15), you can learn a lighter way of being with yourself. But wait a minute: Are you sure we’re not baptizing unbiblical self-esteem teaching here?
Chuck DeGroat helps us when he shares that the self-esteem movement has largely failed us by creating burdens rather than lifting them. DeGroat goes on to describe the fruit of self compassion:
- Self-compassion is more crucial to our well-being than self-esteem.
- Self-compassion is the practice of an imperfect person, someone who is merely human in an age where we’re all trying to be superhuman.
- Self-compassion allows us to give ourselves the gift of being adequate at many things instead of exceptional at everything.
- Self-compassion gives our inner critic the day off.
- Self-compassion frees us from the slavery of narcissistic self-promotion and self-perfection.
- Self-compassion allows us to pay attention to the inner conversations we’re always having, as we debate which voice will decide the moment, the day, the future.
- Self-compassion allows us, in the end, to be imperfect.*
Self-esteem will break down in the cul-de-sac of self, while compassion moves outward from the Father’s heart through the Son’s life into how you view yourself.
From there, compassion moves into the world and changes how you view others.
You become less judgmental, less rigid, and less demanding of perfection in others. You notice the plank in your eye before your neighbor’s speck of sawdust (Matthew 7:3). And you are less defensive because you know that Jesus’ compassion extends even to your two by four that’s dripping with eye goop.
How does this transformative experience of knowing and believing God’s love become our reality? John tells us, “so we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (I John 4:16).
In our union with Christ, Jesus shares his abundant riches with us, namely, the Father’s love. This is why Charles Spurgeon summed up the entire Christian life as abiding in love–consistent growth in our knowledge and belief in God’s love for us.
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We can lose hope in that vast ocean called shame and fear that will never reach the shore of God’s love. Yet the loving heart of Jesus is deep enough to swallow up every drop of our disgrace. No power or superpower in the scene or unseen world can banish us from the presence of such love (Romans 8:35-39).
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We need to stop cringing before the tune of our shame and start walking to the beat of Jesus’s love.
Only then will we learn that we’re safe to try and fail. We’re free to make mistakes and still feel the firm grip of Jesus. We’ll focus less on what we’re doing and more on what Jesus has done.
All this and more will happen when we say with John, “I know and believe the love God has for us” (I John 4:16).
*Chuck DeGroat, Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion and Healing the Divided Self, p. 4-5.
**Excerpt from The Art of Stability by Rusty McKie, p.30-33.
