Recognizing Our Distortions

We need a keen awareness of the unknown forces that continually struggle within us. The human subconscious is a bottomless sea. From it come many of the actions that affect our lives, often without our even realizing it.

We must ask the Holy Spirit for a profound, penetrating ability to discern those structural flaws, those “Achilles’ tendons” in our character that, like invisible cracks running the length of a wall, endanger our stability and endurance. We all have such flaws. In many cases we will not be able to eliminate them entirely; we will only manage to control them and keep them under discipline throughout our lives.

The emotional defects and distortions that life leaves us with are often powerful and persistent. The reality is that, many times, the most we can hope for is to subject them daily to the Word of God, preventing them from leading us into self-destructive behavior and giving ourselves a dose of humility, prudence, and self-control each day. Like people with a persistent health condition, we must keep our “illness” in view and take appropriate steps to keep it under control. This in no way denies the power or reality of God. Nor does it deny His ability to change us eventually if we surrender wholeheartedly to His transforming grace.

A BENEVOLENT THORN

One of the greatest Greek philosophers declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Many of the problems and neuroses in our personalities are due to a lack of self-knowledge and introspection. The psalmist prays: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. And see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way” (Ps. 139:23 and 24). The reality is that there are often invisible obstacles in our psyche, subtle distortions in our character of which we are not fully aware. These negative energies move clandestinely through the unrecognized or unexplored regions of our personalities. This lack of discernment on our part often allows the defects in our character to keep manifesting themselves and distorting our behavior.

On many occasions, we will have to struggle with these inner distortions for a long time, patiently exploring and examining them in the light of the Word, gradually reducing their compulsive power over us, until at last we manage to banish them through confession, prayer, and active submission to God.

More mysteriously still, there will be times when God sovereignly decides to keep that agonizing inner struggle alive within us until some mysterious purpose known only to Him has been fulfilled. In these cases, our inner struggle, our awareness of our own spiritual weakness, will become like a benevolent adversary, a mysterious trainer whom God will use to draw us closer to Him, keep us humbler, and make us more dependent on His grace.

Once again, the apostle Paul’s famous thorn is illuminating here. After receiving glorious revelations, Paul had to endure a humiliating and persistent inner struggle about which we are given few details, but which evidently caused him great anguish and a sense of guilt (see 2 Corinthians 12:7 and 8).

After asking the Lord three times to free him from that painful spiritual condition, and receiving the same refusal, accompanied by a call simply to surrender himself to His grace, Paul understood that God allowed this apparent weakness for his own good, and that it served a mysterious purpose of sanctifying and strengthening him. His “thorn” kept him humble. It reminded him that, despite his privileged experiences, he remained a mere prisoner of God’s grace, perpetually in need of His mercy. That enforced humility protected him. It was a kind of preventive discipline. It kept him safe from the inevitable ravages of spiritual pride to which he would have succumbed, given the exalted revelations he had received. Hence the beautiful words of 2 Corinthians 12:9 and 10, which we would do well to heed ourselves:

9 Therefore I will most gladly boast instead in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

10 For this reason, for the sake of Christ, I rejoice in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in distress; for when I am weak, then I am strong.