The Great Temptations Towards a False Self
I was so ministered to by what Peter Scazzero wrote:
Temptation One: I Am What I Do (Performance)
Our culture asks the same question. What have you achieved? How have you demonstrated your usefulness? What do you do? Most of us consider ourselves worthwhile if we have scored sufficient successes - in work, family, school, church, relationships. When we don’t, we may move harder and faster, go inward into depression out of shame, or perhaps blame others for our predicaments.
Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and writer of the best-seller Seven Storey Mountain, tells of an occasion in his life:
A few years ago, a man who was compiling a book on success wrote and asked me to contribute a statement of how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it happened that I had once written a best-seller this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same thing again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said it was surely this: be anything you like, be madmen, drunks… of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. I heard no more reply from him and I am not aware that my reply was published.
Merton understood how easily earthly success tempts us to find our worth and value outside of God’s inexhaustible, free love for him in Christ.
Temptation Two: I Am What I Have (Possession)
A powerful example of this is found in the play Amadeus. Antonio Salieri is the court musician whose soul is destroyed by envy, by not possessing enough. He longs to create music for God and to be famous. He is really good. The problem is that he is not as good as Mozart, who is a genius. Mozart possesses the ability to actually compose a symphony in his head, something few people in history have been able to do.
Rather than recognize Mozart’s genius and bring it to the world, Salieri is angry at God for being so unfair. Tragically, he believes Mozart is loved of God, while he is not.
Our culture, family of origin and flesh tell me that only possessions and talents and applause from other people are sufficient for security. Jesus models surrender of my will to the love of God as the true anchor for who I am.
Temptation Three: I am What Others Think (Popularity)
Some of us are addicted to what others think. True freedom comes when we no longer need to be somebody special in other people’s eyes because we know we are love-able and good enough.
M. Scott Peck illustrates the point through a story of meeting a classmate at his high school at the age of fifteen. The following are his reflections after a conversation with his friend:
I suddenly realized that for the entire ten-minute period from when i had first seen my acquaintance until that very moment, I had been totally self-preoccupied. For the two or three minutes before we met all I was thinking about was the clever things I might say that would impress him. During our five minutes together I was listening to what he had to say only so that I might turn it into a clever rejoinder. I watched him only so that I might see what effect my remarks were having upon him. And for the two or three minutes after we separated my sole thought content was those things I could have said that might have impressed him even more. I had not cared a whit for my classmate.
What is most startling in reading a detailed explanation of what goes on beneath the surface at the age of fifteen is that the same dynamics continue into the twenties, thirties, fifties, seventies, and nineties. We remain trapped in living a pretend life out of an unhealthy concern for what other people think.
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