Therefore,
if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has
come! 2 Corinthians 5:17
There must be a real
giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ
will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the
sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about
you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about
the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also ours, and
ours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it.
It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same
principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you
will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about
what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who
bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to
tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you
will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and
you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to
death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your
whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find
eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be
really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the
dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred,
loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will
find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
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