29 Jan In Our Relationships, Ignorance Is Not Bliss
Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to our relationships. What we don’t know about ourselves can hurt us. And, it can keep us in the shallows with God.
We all develop coping strategies to help us deal with our own perceived inadequacies. Depending on our personality, our family culture, and our experiences growing up, we create defense mechanisms that we think will protect us when we feel insecure or that are helpful in pleasing our parents, our teachers, our friends, and to satisfy the expectations of the world around us.
They may include anger, humor, emotional distance, perkiness, sarcasm, arrogance, sweetness, workaholism, sensuality, irresponsibility, keeping up with the Joneses, and a hundred other possibilities.
Over time, these strategies can become so deeply ingrained within us that we can lose our ability to relate to others in a healthy and positive way. We can become clueless at best and dysfunctional at worst.
Seeing ourselves as we really are, and seeing ourselves as God wants us to be, are vital components of becoming self-aware.
Becoming self-aware involves recognizing the unhelpful parts of our personalities and behaviors that limit us so that we can become the spiritually and emotionally healthy person that God wants us to be.
So, properly understood, becoming self-aware is a very positive thing. It does not mean becoming self-absorbed or self-satisfied with things in our lives that ought to change.
Rather, self-awareness is an accurate perception of who we are (our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, our thoughts and beliefs, our emotions, and our motivations), and how we come across to others.
If we are self-aware, it enables us to understand how God sees us, and the areas in which He is eager to help us change.
It is also easier for us to understand other people and detect how they perceive us in return. If we are not self aware, others (rightly) conclude we’re “clueless,” and it diminishes our potential to influence them for Christ, as well as to have satisfying relationships with them.
Understood this way, the Bible has a great deal to say about self-awareness.
- The Bible encourages self-awareness
Romans 12:3 says, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment.”
Nope. The Bible doesn’t want us to be clueless.
An accurate self-knowledge is an essential starting point in Christian growth (on a personal level), as well as ministry/impact on others, especially today when our culture tends to try to make people always feel good about themselves, regardless of their attitudes, values and behavior.
David wrote: “Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my anxious thoughts! And see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!” (Psalm 139:23–24).
He was acknowledging his own lack of self-awareness, and calling on God to save him from himself.
- The Holy Spirit encourages self-awareness
The Holy Spirit encourages self-awareness when He
- Enables Christians to understand the deeper truths of Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:10-14),
- Uses the that deeper understanding of Scripture to help us see where our lives need to change (Heb. 4:12), and
- Strengthens willing Christians to progressively live out the truth they have understood (Ephesians 3:16) eventually taking on the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).
- We can pursue greater self-awareness
The Bible doesn’t give us the option of ignoring what kind of people we are. It calls us to be more self-aware. James 1:22-24 says,
But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.
We are to be proactive in learning how our lives stack up to reality.
So Scripture teaches us to pay close attention to being doers of the word, and not just hearers; close attention to seeing the difference between how we are living and how we ought to live; close attention to being self-aware.
- Strategies for increasing self-awareness
There are many strategies for increasing self-awareness. Here are some simple first steps:
- Memorizing and meditating upon Scripture. Memorizing 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 so well that you can say as fast as an auctioneer is a powerful exercise in developing greater self-awareness in your relationships with other people.
- Reading helpful books. Suggestions here are almost limitless, but Gary Chapman’s book, The 5 Love Languages, is a great place to start in understanding how your blind spots might be affecting your closest relationships.
- Take psychometric tests. The Myers-Briggs and DISC are popular psychometric tests that can be very helpful in enabling you to see your personality strengths and weaknesses. Another test getting a lot of attention today is the enneagram. The book, The Road Back to You, by Ian Cron, is a helpful one for that test.
- Talk with trusted friends. Proverbs 27:6 says, “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” If we have a trusted peer, friend, mentor, spouse, who will lovingly and faithfully give us accurate feedback about how we come across to others, it can be a powerful source of self-awareness.
- Prayer. As we spend time with God seeking him, his truth, and the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, the Lord can lead us to powerful insights on how He sees us, and how we might change for the better.
Conclusion
When Benjamin Franklin was a young man, he chose 13 qualities that he felt embodied moral perfection, and committed to spending 13 weeks – one week on each quality – perfecting them, with the intent to become morally perfect in 13 weeks.
At the end of 13 weeks he realized he was not morally perfect. So he tried again. At the end of the second 13 weeks, he was still not morally perfect, so he tried again. And again, and again, and again, for the rest of his life.
At the end of his life, he said he was chagrined to admit that he never became morally perfect. But he said, “I became a much better man for trying and failing than if I had never tried at all.”
Our standards will always be greater than our actions. So we must take solace in the same thing Franklin did – realizing that we will never become perfect, but we will be much better for trying and failing then if we never tried it all.
As we pursue self-awareness, it is a balancing act. It is helpful for us to have a clear picture of who we are and how we come across to others. It is also helpful for us to have a desire to change. We must balance that with the fact that change is rarely instantaneous, and we grow to maturity in Christ rather than “poof-ing” to maturity in Christ (2 Peter 3:18).
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