I will often use the language of “true self” and “false self,” because I think it gets at something important. The problem is that others use this language as well, and they do so in the exact opposite way I want to use it.

Inevitably, people get confused.

I still haven’t decided whether or not to just drop this sort of language, although I’m finding that increasingly tempting. But for now, I want to just clarify what should be biblically obvious: Your true self is not your authentic self.

Key to this are texts like:

  • Colossians 3:3: “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

  • Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Notice that in these texts there is a grounding of your “self” that is not discovered in you, but if you are a Christian, it is in Christ.

Notice as well that the location of this reality is both external to you (“hidden with Christ in God”) but also internal to you through the indwelling of Christ (Gal. 2:20).

The external and internal realities is what, in part, give us the experience of not being at home in ourselves. We cannot know true home yet because our lives are hidden with Christ in God, and, as Paul goes on in that text, “When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”

You also will appear.

While we can readily and often (perhaps) off-handedly remark that “we walk by faith and not by sight,” we can miss how easy it is to not live that way in relation to ourselves.

We live in a world that is obsessed with being your “authentic self,” assuming that you can look within to find yourself. But that looking within, if it is without Christ, will only inevitably add to the in-curvature of yourself in sin (i.e., the incurvatus in se as we often call it). It will be an attempt to self-construct, self-generate and self-define that can only ever unravel our humanity.

The surprise is not that the world is doing this.

The shock is that Christians have bought into this lie, thinking that they can even use Christ and Christianity to self-construct.

This is where the Gospel is entirely lost to a kind of Pelagian self-help project that, as Paul writes to the Galatians, begins in the Spirit but tries to be perfected by the flesh (Gal. 3:3).

What this means is that your false self is you in and of yourself, what Paul calls your “old man” (i.e., you in Adam).

Your true self is the “new man,” which is you in Christ — the new man –– who has established the truth of who you are, but has only done so in relation to himself.

Von Balthasar helpfully narrates this dynamic when he writes:

“Simon the fisherman could have explored every region of his ego prior to his encounter with Christ, but he would not have found ‘Peter’ there; for the present, the ‘form’ summed up in the name ‘Peter,’ the particular mission reserved for him alone, is hidden in the mystery of Christ’s soul.”

Jesus named Simon “Peter,” not because of something he saw in Simon, but because of who Simon would be in Christ. Simon’s “true self” is Peter, because Peter is who he becomes in Christ.

Your false self, therefore, is not merely the masks you wear, nor is it simply living in a way that is inauthentic. Your false self is caught up in Adam and the way of Adam.

For the Christian, their true self is in Christ, and therefore is only discoverable by faith. This is why faith feels like “looking in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12). One day, we “will be like him, for we will see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). One day “we will know fully, even as we have been fully know” (1 Cor. 13:12). But now we know in part, even ourselves, because our true self resides in another.

Christ is the external pole of the self that grounds us with an immutable sort of grounding. As Kierkegaard explains, using a wonderful image:

“When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed.”

Too often we look inward to ground ourselves, at the chaotic waves of our experiences and emotions. When we do so we turn to the wrong place. Look to Jesus. Remember that, as a Christian, your life is grounded with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). Find the mooring of your self there, and trust that Christ is the foundation that establishes, guides and orients your life.

and other blogs written by Kyle Strobel can be found on his .