By Warren Lamb
Editor’s Note: Today Warren Lamb writes about our focus as we go about living each day. Warren seeks to help us understand the difficulties of focusing on self and provides us the benefits of focusing on Christ instead. Do you tend to be self-focused? Has anyone ever claimed, “All you seem to care about or think about is yourself?” In either case and many others, this blog will be helpful for you.
Where’s Your Focus?
Although your path may seem like a murky shadow right now, God’s Word will light your path and guide your steps (Psalm 119:105).
It almost seems like the entire world conspires to get us to rigorously focus our attention and energy on our own wants, needs, and desires. Just about everyone seems to be trying to find out what will make them the most happy, and we are constantly encouraged to do what we think is best for ourselves.
The leading marketing strategies of successful companies focus on feeding the self-important, self-absorbed tendencies of our rebellious nature. And, we seem to cooperate most willingly.
After all, we deserve to be happy, don’t we? We deserve the very best, no matter what, isn’t that true?
There are innumerable self-help teachers, self-improvement trainings, psychologists, counselors, and untold spiritual guides willing to help us connect with our “inner-selves,” to discover the “person within.”
Psychologists and mental health therapists encourage their clients to look deeply inside themselves in order to discover what went wrong on their journey to self-fulfillment and achieving their true potential, and then look there to find their own solution to the problem within themselves.
However, for the follower of Christ, is that helpful or does that create additional difficulties?
The Problem with Being Self-Focused
When we are self-focused, it is impossible for us to have an objective view of ourselves or of anybody else. Self-focus translates to us being focused on our perceptions and ideas of ourselves, on whether or not our needs are being met the way we believe we are entitled to have them met.
When we are self-focused, we either fix our attention on any and all positive things about ourselves that we can find (seeing ourselves as wonderful and magnificent), or we fix our attention on every negative thing that is or possibly might be true about us (concluding that we are awful and less than worthless). Everyone either “owes” us or is out to get us.
It really is impossible to be objective when we examine our innermost self using our own perceptions and interpretations of ourselves as the gauge. The first reason this is so is because our emotions get in the way. How we “feel” about ourselves is driven by what we believe about ourselves based on what we have saturated our minds with about ourselves.
Then we either magnify the positive, become filled with pride, and exalt ourselves; or we exaggerate the negative, become filled with toxic shame, and decide we are good-for-nothing.
The second reason it is impossible for us to be objective is because we are the only one in the universe that sees us the way we see ourselves. Did you know that when you look in the mirror, you are the only person in the universe who sees what you see? What you see is a reversed reflection of how you really look.
Try this: take a small mirror and hold it in your hand so that, when you look in it, you are seeing the other mirror reflected in it. Now try and comb your hair. What happened? This will give you a good idea of just how different reality is from the image in your mind.
There can even be a dramatic swing back and forth between the two extremes: one moment we think we are the greatest person who has ever lived and we can conquer the world, the next we are convinced that we are the worst person that has ever lived and the world would be better off without us. We either feel that everything exists to benefit us, or that everything and everybody is against us.
Further, there is often a powerful dynamic at work when a person is trying to describe to someone else what kind of person they are. Most people will magnify and extol their good qualities while minimizing the bad, or they will magnify the bad while minimizing the good.
They often see themselves as either very good or very bad with no real middle ground. The more shame-filled a person’s past the more likely this is. Rarely do we get a clear picture of what someone is really like based on their self-report. This is because most people will describe themselves based on their own inward-focused vision of themselves.
Because we are unable to be objective on our own, it is easier for a mature Christian who is close to us to truly know us than it is for us to have a balanced and clear picture of who we really are.
Think about the people in your life that you know well. After a season of getting to know a person, of seeing them in different settings and circumstances, don’t you find that you have at times a better idea of what they are really like, sometimes even more than they do themselves?
This is why being in a safe, honest, healthy, and caring community is a critical part of our journey and our ongoing well-being. As believers, this is why the “one another’s” in the Bible are so vital for us.
The Remedy for Being Self-Focused
If we focus our attention outwardly on Christ and others instead of inwardly on ourselves, our selfish motivations are replaced by love for Christ and love for others.
This is how we live in harmony with the two things Jesus said are the most important rules in life for everyone (Matthew 22:36-40): Loving God with all that we are and all that we have, and loving others as much (or more) than we love ourselves.
The view that God and most everyone else has of us is one that we are unfamiliar with and even uncomfortable with because our self-focused view is distorted. But their perspective is the real image we portray to the world. Few are actually fooled by the avatar we have created for long—except ourselves, maybe.
When we get our perceptions about ourselves from what God says in His Word about us and from mature Christians who live outside of us, we become real, authentic, content, and calmly confident. We no longer live our life disconnected from reality, disconnected from others, and—more importantly— disconnected from God. Instead, we find ourselves in all of the joyfully messy and exhilaratingly vibrant give-and-receive of a biblical view of life.
We also find that the think-too-highly and think-too-lowly things we have believed about ourselves are lies and that we no longer have to live in bondage to them. We surrender those lies to Christ, replace them with His truth, and live our lives fully in the real world.
“What we saturate on is what we believe; what we believe is what we live.” Now the question is: Which truth-claims about you and your circumstances are you saturating on and believing—the true ones or the false ones?
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Warren Lamb is a husband, father, and grandfather. Former psychologist, he now serves as a pastor, Bible teacher, Biblical counselor, author, and theology professor. Experienced in counseling a broad spectrum of troubles, he specializes with survivors of trauma and abuse, abandonment and neglect, domestic oppression and violence, kidnapping and sex-trafficking. He also works extensively with the sexually broken, including those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction. He provides specialized training for churches, including shepherding churches through the aftermath of a leader’s moral failure.
Warren serves as the Vice President of IABC and director of the Truth in Love Biblical Counseling & Training Center (formerly Vancouver Bible Institute in Vancouver, WA). He also serves as director and Lead Counselor at Truth in Love Biblical Counseling & Training Center, and as Lead Teaching Elder at Truth in Love Fellowship.
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