Quotes about Self

To put it bluntly, your flesh is a weasel, a poser, and a selfish pig. And your flesh is not you. Did you know that? Your flesh is not the real you.

The passage is not about trying to save your skin by ducking martyrdom or something like that. The word Christ uses for "life" is the word psyche—the word for our soul, our inner self, our heart. He says that the things we do to save our psyche, our self, those plans to save and protect our inner life—those are the things that will actually destroy us.

Second, we chose to believe Christ is already within us, and we remind ourselves of this marvel. The springs of life well up from within.

the Self stakes out its own territory within us to assure getting its own way, ordering our world to its likings. It has imbedded assumptions and privileges in our psyche; there is a momentum to its desires, motives, and presence in us. I call this the Self Life.

There is a satisfaction we don't want to come to until we come to it in God....[Disappointments] serve to remind us every day that we cannot make life work the way we want....If we'll let it, the disappointment can be God's way of continually drawing us back to himself.

The most essential gift you have to give is yourself.

Notice that the older brother can't receive the father's generosity; he's closed off, curtained off, by his attention to Self. This is the hidden danger I spoke of: the stubborn life of the Self. The Exalted Me, unsubmitted and unsurrendered to the rule of Christ in me.

When we abandon ourselves to love, we find ourselves closer to the one who is always doing that Himself. We find God.

The wilderness trial of Christ is, at its core, a test of his identity. "If you are who you think you are... " If a man is ever to find out who he is and what he's here for, he has got to take that journey for himself. He has got to get his heart back.

This is every man's deepest fear: to be exposed, to be found out, to be discovered as an impostor, and not really a man.

The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead.

Jesus, I surrender the Self Life to you.