I'll Start with Me

Why personal cultivation is crucial in an unravelling age

It’s hard not to feel helpless these days, impotently angry, and executively cut off from the outrages that bombard our minds and consciences. It’s hard to say if our world in its present moment is more out of control and violently charged than at previous points in recent history, but these features are now more visible than ever, more insistent in taking our attention day after day. Almost by the hour, we can access the vitriol and violence, the hatred and harmfulness of the worst of human nature, and much of it pours from those with the most power in the world. We are incensed but powerless to make a single change in the people, places and problems that fill our feeds and flood our minds. This is what it is to live in a full-blown media age - we are handed a bargain-basement form of omniscience but not even a secondhand version of omnipotence. No wonder we are conflicted.

I have been thinking about this a lot in recent days, and trying to plot some coordinates for how I live my own life day by day. As electorates become increasingly disenfranchised and our capacity as citizens to hold those in power to account is ever more eclipsed, where can I find true agency as a human being? Where can I see real change take place? How can I make sure that my attention is not so focused on the corruptions and depravity of public figures that the practice of personal holiness gets neglected? How can I make sure that in my anger, I do not sin?

None of those questions can be answered easily, but a simple thought, really a motto, has been working on my heart and mind lately - ‘I’ll start with me’. In this post, I want to explain why this posture is helping me to focus on the things I really can seek change in, and how it might guard me from bitterness on the one hand, or indolence on the other.

At the outset, some clarity might be helpful in terms of what I am not saying.

I am not arguing here for political quietude in the face of public evil: where power and depravity grab for more and more governance or realise ever greater harm locally and globally, speaking (and even suffering) in opposition is essential.

I am not arguing for a merely privatised Christianity, a kind of cosseted gnosticism that can prioritise spiritual life while allowing the physical to go to seed. I am also not arguing for moral ambivalence about the evils of those within the jurisdiction of the church, nor the abandonment of church discipline in favour of atomised introspection.

I am also not arguing for introspection in place of captivating views of Jesus. Gazing on the perfections and saving sufficiency of the Saviour is primary, but I also need to address the glories of his gospel to my soul as well.

Finally, as will become clear later, in making a case for starting with me, I am not advocating stopping with me, but rather ordering my attention correctly and acting where I have most agency.

I’ll start with me because Jesus told me to

Being a moralist is much easier than living morally. Spotting evil in others is more straightforward than identifying it in my own heart. This reality is as old as humanity’s fall (the buck started to be passed in the garden) and is at the heart of much of our self-deception as human beings. Being angry with others while going easy on ourselves comes naturally to many of us; raging against being stuck in traffic while not recognising that we are traffic is a contradiction many of us embody.

Starting with me, taking time to reflect on the condition of my own heart before God is counterintuitive and is quickly resisted by the guardians of my personal peace of mind. Paul Tripp has famously written about our inner barrister, our inbuilt counsel for the defence who quickly rises to argue in our favour when accusation or the pangs of conscience are felt. Starting with me seeks to throw a spanner into this moral mechanism, and insists on seeing my own soul before prying into those of others.

Of course, Jesus made this point patently clear during his earthly ministry. The striking and somewhat comical image of trying to remove a speck from someone else’s eye before dealing with the telegraph pole protruding from one’s own truly hits home. My calling is not to ignore moral evil in others, but to deal with my own first, to cleanse my own sight before seeking to sort out anyone else, or point out the problems they are bringing to the world.

My social media feed is alight with outrage, much of it morally justified, the majority of it founded on a sense of injustice at what is happening in the world and how people in power are abusing their position. I feel the same anger, but if this is the only focus I have, if it is the only direction I look in terms of correction, I am ignoring the need that I have for greater holiness and greater likeness to Jesus. Communal anger is cathartic; in many cases, it is the healthy overflow of good principles, but if it is all I have, if that same moral consistency isn’t focused on my own soul, then I am in danger of becoming a hypocrite.

I’ll start with me because I am a universe of need

Once I train the searchlight of truth on myself rather than on my society or public figures within it, I make a grim discovery: I am a universe of need. Here I’m not entering the unhealthy territory of always wriggling worm-like in the loam of my own unrighteousness as though Christ didn’t come to bring my salvation, and as though God doesn’t love me or like me. That kind of pathological self-loathing has little to do with true godliness or the true gospel.

But even when I take into account God’s love for me, his sovereign choice to save me, his covenant commitment to complete his work in me, his gracious imputing of Christ’s righteousness to me, his adopting acceptance of me into his family, there is still so much for him to do in my life. Selecting just my thoughts, or my words, or my actions, or my attitudes, or my motives, betrays the vast territory that the Holy Spirit still needs to till. I am a man beloved by God, but still broken by internal contradictions and the incessant war that is waged between the Spirit and the flesh. There is so much fallow ground in my heart, so much hard soil to be harrowed, so much of God’s gracious agency needed for my renewing and reviving.

I am in top form as long as I can look around the world, Pharisee-like, and thank God that I am unlike all the awful people who gain prominence or dominance with such bloodied ease. My place, though, is with the publican, asking God to simply be merciful to me a sinner, in the vast universe of my need.

I’ll start with me to avoid ‘fruitless complaints’

Lately, I have been concentrating my mind afresh on the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, sometimes called the 1689 Confession. This document has formed, and is forming, the backbone of how I express my doctrinal and ecclesiological commitments. It is a masterpiece of beautiful concision and theological precision that only seems to improve with every focused visit I have paid to it over the last thirty years or so.

On my present read, I have been working very slowly through the Confession’s introduction, the intriguingly titled ‘To the Judicious and Impartial Reader’. This prefatory essay is a powerful example of how true doctrinal charity promotes rather than denigrates gracious catholicity. The framers of the 1689 Confession were at pains to express themselves in a way that made their position clear but retained true fellowship with those who differed from them. In one telling paragraph, the original signatories to the Confession state the following,

We also desire that in this day of backsliding we might not waste our breath in fruitless complaints about the evils of others, but might each begin at home, to reform in the first place our own hearts and ways, and then to enliven all those with whom we have some influence to the same work, in order that – if God wills it – no-one might deceive themselves by relying upon and trusting in an appearance of godliness, without the power of it and the inward experience of the effectiveness of those truths that they profess.

Even a cursory reading of seventeenth-century English history will reveal how contested a period it was, and yet these brothers from another age wanted to avoid ‘fruitless complaints about the evils of others’ so that they might focus on their own hearts, their own hearths, their own households. This is a great antidote to being sucked into pointless polemics among people whom we have scant chance of persuading on our own beliefs. Beginning with our own hearts and working for the discipleship of our own homes is to send out the early ripples that can change the whole world.

I’ll start with me because that’s how corporate change happens

This brings me to the final reason for starting with me. Focusing on the health of our own souls is not isolationist or the last gasp of the age of individualism. True corporate change is seldom fostered by an outward sense of righteous indignation, and more often by a heart set on personal transformation. This work of the Spirit in our souls does not merely aim at providing individuals with a quiet life, but understands that the needs of my home will be better met by my heart being well framed, the needs of my brothers and sisters will likewise find greater resources if my soul is set alight by God’s love, and my efforts at social reform will be energised by the life of God working in me and through me.

One of the most touching images from church history is of William Wilberforce walking to Westminster each day from his home, reciting Psalm 119 to himself until he knew it by heart. The Psalmist’s desire for a heart tuned to God became Wilberforce’s, and that heart became a social rudder that steered society away from barbarism and inhumanity.

Conclusion

There is so much that I simply cannot change in my world today, and I often go to bed at night grieved by the seemingly irremediable brokenness of everything. To recognise that my calling is not to rage against the dying light of reason and civility in my society, but to set myself to personal reformation, by the power of the Spirit, for the glory of God, and for the good of every other life I touch.

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