As Christians, we live outside ourselves. We do not forge our own identity and decide on our own purpose in life. Instead, we receive these from God. Since we are baptized into Christ, we are given an identity as His beloved children. As we are called to follow Christ, we are given a purpose of serving Him and our neighbor. Our lives are shaped by faith and love, each drawing us out of ourselves. This is the focus of my new book, Lift Your Eyes: How to Live Outside Yourself. We look up to God in faith and thanksgiving, and we look out to our neighbor in love and service.
We can also now ask, though, is there a right way of “looking in”? Yes, there is! As with many proposals, we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Scriptures offer this vision of the Christian life outside ourselves, but they also direct us to introspection, meditation, and self-examination. There is such a thing as an inner life for Christian people that finds its rightful place when what I’ve discussed above is the broader vision.
The Psalms are the classic place we can find expressions and examples of this. There we read things like, “How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?” (Psalm 13:2) and “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 42:5a). There is a sense of looking in here. Looking in itself is not the problem. The problem is why you’re looking in and whether any other source of truth is part of the conversation. The psalmists never look in and take counsel only in and with themselves to find the final answers to life’s big questions. In fact, in the verse quoted above, the psalmist goes on to say to his own soul, “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 42:5b–6). The looking in here does not exclude God. Rather, God’s people live in the awareness that they are always in His presence, even if they quietly take counsel within.
The same can be said of Mary, the mother of our Lord, in the New Testament. On several occasions, Luke intriguingly records Mary as “pondering … in her heart” the words and events surrounding the birth of Jesus (Luke 2:19). Again, the issue is not so much whether there is an inner life but the content and focus of that. Mary engages in introspection and meditation not only on what she thinks and feels about all that has happened but also on the words that come to her from the Lord through the angel and on the ways in which the Word made flesh is growing up in front of her.
Another way we rightly look in as Christian people is in regard to the spiritual discipline known as mortification—that is, the putting to death of our sinful flesh. Paul speaks in these terms in places such as Colossians 3:5 and Romans 8:13, and Luther picks up on it as part of his explanation of what Baptism means for daily living. One aspect of this that can be helpful for Christian growth is the practice of self-examination, which is a type of looking in. We can reflect on our lives in light of the Ten Commandments, and so better discern the specific ways our sinful flesh continues to impact our own life and the lives of those around us. We confess those sins, receive God’s Spirit-filled word of forgiveness, put to death the old sinful flesh, and daily arise as the new people God has created us to be. Paul specifically mentions the practice of self-examination in connection with receiving the Lord’s Supper, which Luther also picks up on in his catechisms.
This then means that the ongoing life of the old self being drowned daily and sins being put to death—a pattern that requires an element of looking in—happens within the framework of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Our Baptism into Christ means that we battle against sin as those who have already been forgiven and received into God’s family as beloved children, and the Lord’s Supper is Christ’s ongoing application of this forgiveness and a source of power in the battle. These external means of God’s grace and Spirit prevent our self-examination and looking in at our own sin from becoming a downward spiral of introspective despair. Even as we look in, we do so in order to look up again in faith to God’s grace to us in Christ and to look out to others in love.
The true life God gives us is one lived outside ourselves by faith in Christ and love for neighbor. We do not look in to find answers to life’s big questions of identity, meaning, and purpose. Yet as those who now know who they are and what they are called to in Christ, there can be a rich, Spirit-filled inner life that is part of our Christian growth. There can be a right way of looking in.
Scripture: ESV®.