Transformation of the True Self

In the church, I’ve seen many come and go, leaders rise and fall, and discipleship efforts work and fail. Perhaps the greatest predictor of success, at least from my vantage point at twenty-one years old in Christ, is how someone treats authenticity in their journey of transformation. What seems to separate those who will “make it” in their journey in Christ and those who don’t is whether they are real before God.

Now it doesn’t suffice us just to “be real.” “Live your truth” doesn’t float in the waters of God’s deep. Nevertheless, there’s something about being true. Yes, you need God’s people, God’s Spirit, and God’s Word, all working in concert, with you actively engaged in all three in different ways. But our activity in these ways doesn’t matter if we’re false. Allow me to submit to you, then, a newly framed bottom-line metric for discipleship: Your real self, truly transformed. I’ve done the fake, white-knuckling-it transformation, where you pull up your bootstraps, do something forced, and it fades as quickly as it came onto the horizon. I’m not interested in that (any more), and neither are you, I’m sure. More important, I don’t think Jesus is interested in it either. My thoughts on this come from Jesus’ intense words in Matthew 7: “I never knew you.”

Where was the emphasis when Jesus said, “I never knew you” as he dismissed the pious adherents in Matthew 7:23 into their perdition? Those Jesus spoke to here were those who pleaded with him to enter the kingdom, flying high the flag of their false self. Was his emphasis, “I never knew you”? Or “I never knew you?”

These highfalutin disciples had prophesied and even cast out demons in his name, but their relationship with God wasn’t real. It wasn’t that they didn’t know God. It was that God, in Christ, didn’t know them.

How could this be?

I would submit to you that they were dealing their false self to God, and to their horrible surprise, it didn’t work.

What if it doesn’t work for us either?

I hope my post here might help those of us in danger of a great surprise on “that day,” to avoid such a surprise. It is my strong belief that unless we bring our true self to the table with God, no discipleship metrics count.

• None of our church attendance
• None of our evangelistic efforts
• None of our sermons
• None of our discipleship meetings
• None of our new initiatives

None of these counts, I am suggesting, in the kingdom’s economy without involving our true self.

When I say “counts,” I mean that in a very broad and inclusive sense—the sense in which I believe Jesus meant it in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5–7. For those purported disciples in Matthew 7:23 who come to Jesus on “that day,” they will not see the results they had hoped for from their life of doing things for God.

For clarity, I think Jesus offers real and substantial rewards for his disciples for what they do (whatever he meant when he said “great is your reward” in Matthew 6:4, 6, and 18). I don’t think Jesus was being facetious when he motivated his disciples to act in holy accord with his holistic righteousness by mentioning rewards in the kingdom. He didn’t say they were earning their salvation or even these rewards; he simply said, “If you do x, your Father will reward you.” He didn’t say, “If you do y, God will save you.” There’s a difference between rewards and salvation. And there’s a difference between effort and earning. As Dallas Willard said, “Grace is not opposed to effort but to earning.” Jesus rewards our efforts, not our earning.

My point is that you can do all “the things,” but if you do them under the guise of your false self, then those things don’t count in the kingdom. They just don’t work in a way that matters or lasts. That is, we can pray, fast, prophesy, and even cast out demons, all in the name of Jesus—even knowing all about Jesus—but if we are not known by him, then none of it counts. If these acts of discipleship we perform are not done from a place of authenticity, where we allow Jesus to authentically experience the real us (where he could rightly say I know you), then there are no rewards. We might as well pack our bags and go home. In fact, we might have just stayed home from the beginning and not have even tried. This is because our false self in discipleship doesn’t count in the kingdom. God can still work with us and do whatever he wants with our without our permission—he can allure any heart!—but we must run from false-self discipleship as soon as we’re aware that we might be participating in it.

So let me encourage you to bring your true self to the discipleship table so that you can make sure it’s worth your time. I would hate for any of us, myself included, to get to “that day” and find out it was all a façade—it was all a fake, for naught. So in a sense:

• It’s okay to fail and to fall, as long as it’s real;
• It’s okay to make mistakes and mess up, as long as it’s real; and
• It’s okay to come and go, as long as it’s real.

It doesn’t make all these good and right, but it does make them true.

Why can these be okay at times? Because these dynamics are human, and if we want to be authentically transformed, we must be authentically human on the journey. We don’t seek failure, mistakes, or flakiness, but we can admit when we do.

It’s like wearing a mask to a beauty salon (do “beauty salons” still exist? who knows?!). Anyway, you walk into a beauty salon and sit in the chair to get your hair and face all “did up” (I’m talking to ladies at this point). You want the makeup artist to transform your appearance into something else. But as soon as they see you, they realize there’s nothing they can do, because you’ve come in wearing a mask. They know that since you’re wearing a mask, there’s nothing to “fix up.” Your real face wasn’t even available. They never knew you.

For any guys, now, think of going in to get your hair cut—it’s been a while since I had enough hair on my head to pay someone to cut it, but I remember Great Clips! Instead of coming in “as you are,” in this hypothetical, you come in with a toupee, or one of those Mission Impossible full-face masks completely computer-generated and fabricated. What you wore in looks and feels real, but it’s fake. It might not look that way at first, but eventually the barber realizes he can’t work with you. Any hair he tries to cut is fake. It doesn’t count.

Like wearing a physical mask into either of these places, wearing a mask in the spiritual world before God just doesn’t work. Our fake “work,” at best, doesn’t count; at worse, it qualifies us for departure from the presence of our “Lord, Lord.”

Let me speak to you directly, now, to perhaps save you further heartache: Go ahead and decide to be real. Save yourself the time and headache of trying to fake it. It won’t count anyway. It might count according to human metrics, but not toward the KPIs of the kingdom, which are the only ones that last.

Bring your real self to the real God for real transformation. Only when we do this will we experience true transformation. It’s much more painful to fall on your face when you’re not wearing a mask, but at least you’re truly learning! You can only become the master when you’ve allowed yourself to become the fool. We can learn this by watching young children, who have no guile or pretense as they learn. They come by it so naturally. Perhaps kids make so much progress so quickly because they are real, not just because their brains and bodies are rapidly forming.

Real-self discipleship is not an easy way to live, but it’s literally the only way to live truly. Take the apostle Peter for example: He was sloppy, haphazard, and unstable most of the time. But he was true and experienced true transformation.

So if you’re wanting the real thing, give up being fake. Try the real deal. The goal is not to become your real self apart from Christ. The goal is to become your true self in Christ (more on that another time), but you must start with your true self if you’re going to be truly transformed in Christ and into the image of Christ. He doesn’t accept credits into his kingdom from the false-self classes we’ve take in the world under our pen name. He only accepts kingdom credit from those who enroll in his school of discipleship under their true name.

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The image in this post was created with the use of AI.