The non-Christian world has seized the roles of motivational speakers and self-help teachers. These positions should belong to Christians, because the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only message of true empowerment. It is the only one that is based on truth, backed by the power of God, and anchored in his promises. Thus it is a tragedy that the very roles meant to offer strength and renewal have been surrendered to those who care nothing for the truth and the power of God.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the original and the true motivational message. Christians ought to be the only ones with a philosophy of optimism and confidence. However, they have turned negative and defeatist in their preaching, because they have been faithless, they have stupidly associated pain with piety. Their message has become one of self-harm and self-condemnation. This catastrophic failure has allowed the world to steal the mantle of positive thinking, filling the void with human counterfeits and alternatives.
The positive message of the world is one that exalts the wisdom and virtue of man instead of the power and grace of God. The Faithless preach a negative message that emphasizes suffering and defeat. This is because there is actually no God in their religion, so that they cannot hope for anything better. Then, as a reaction against the positive and hopeful message of the world, the Faithless harden their stance to become even more pessimistic and unbelieving, equating this with being pious, realistic, and submissive to God, when it is in some ways even more blasphemous than the humanistic philosophies of the world.
The Christian answer to positive thinking should not be negative thinking. The Christian alternative to motivational talk is not defeatist and depressing talk. The Christian alternative to self-help is not self-harm and self-hatred. Faithless religious people have allowed the world to seize the positions that Christians ought to occupy, and then as a reaction, Christians destroy their own message for spite. What a bunch of morons. No wonder reprobates look down on Jesus, since they think that weak and stupid losers like these represent him. Of course, although we state the matter in such terms, the Christian message is not the alternative to anything. It is the first and only truth, and other views are counterfeits and false alternatives. But non-Christians have seized the leadership on positive thinking for so long that we now appear to be the ones reacting and suggesting alternatives.
Christians, stupidly imagining that they are true to orthodoxy and wise to resist imitation, throw out the positive and triumphant essence of the gospel, all in an effort to distance themselves from the counterfeits. But in doing so, they fail to provide the original message that the world desperately needs. This is one of the greatest deceptions that the devil has ever orchestrated. He has managed to convince the church that, because the world has counterfeited certain elements of the gospel, we must reject these elements altogether. Instead of seeing the power of God to uplift and empower, the Faithless have banned the truth that belonged to us since the beginning. This does not reduce the world’s influence. It only serves to increase it because the church, by withholding the good things of God, leaves a void that the world greedily fills with alternatives that lead people further away from God. In fact, so-called Christians have been more guilty than others in humanity’s drift from God. They had the treasure in their hands and they condemned it. They had Christ before them and they crucified him!
This pattern has repeated itself many times in history. The church would undermine the gospel through unbelief. Then, when the world stole principles from the gospel and repackaged them on a human basis, stripped of Christ and salvation, the church often responded in alarm by condemning those very principles. The Faithless made it sound like a brave stance for truth, but it was always a foolish retreat from the good news they should have preached. This has left the church impoverished, stripped of its distinctive message of faith and power. Meanwhile, the world has erected a beacon of hope by imitating the gospel, though it is hollow and leads to ruin. Still, it attracts those who yearn for breakthrough. While the world attracts people with its empty promises, the church erodes from within, losing what people it has, offering no real answer. Then the Faithless turn against the few Christians who preach faith and victory from Scripture, claiming that these people are imitating the world’s message and drawing false converts!
It is most stupid to reject the positive elements of the gospel simply because the world has counterfeited them. The correct approach is to assert these truths with greater force and clarity, emphasizing them even more than the world does, and declare that true power and change can only come from God through Jesus Christ. The gospel is the original message of empowerment, saving and improving the whole person. It is when we follow Jesus that we can believe, be positive and confident. True personal power does not come from human potential, because the sinner is corrupt, sick, and dead in spirit. No, true power begins with the reborn spirit, awakened by the word of God and energized by the Spirit of God. The gospel brings the man of faith into a realm of belief and power that no worldly system can reach, because it far surpasses human potential. It teaches the believer to consciously access divine potential to obtain supernatural results. The gospel produces superhuman positive thinking.
Unlike the world’s self-help philosophy, which in essence encourages sinners to lie to themselves in order to generate a degree of superficial effects, the gospel possesses divine power for genuine and lasting self-improvement. The gospel is not a bandage, but a cure. It is not a mask, but transfiguration. While many people who call themselves Christians might shrink from the idea of self-improvement, this stems from careless and faithless thinking. The gospel is certainly not about God-improvement, as if God himself needs to improve! If anyone is going to improve by the gospel, it is we ourselves.
The gospel does not teach self-esteem based on the assumption of inherent worth in man, but it does produce self-esteem, grounded in the worth that God has assigned to us by his grace through Jesus Christ. If you are a Christian, you are not worthless. You are valuable because God has decided that you are valuable, and it would be false and sinful to disagree with him. This sense of self-worth is not inherent in us as human beings, but derived from the revelation of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said, we are nothing without him. But he also said that if we abide in him, and his words abide in us, we will ask what we decide, and it will be done for us. Without him, we have no reason for confidence or worth. But if we follow Christ and keep his words in our hearts, we ought to possess a supernatural sense of worth and confidence, far beyond the self-delusion produced by the world’s self-help message.
The world says, “Believe in yourself. You are worth it. You have unlimited potential.” This is false. Sinners are worthless unless God gives them worth through Jesus Christ. Yet they are still made in the image of God. So even in sinners, whose spiritual and intellectual faculties have been fatally crippled, the false message can stir what little potential remains, making them more effective in life and work. However, it leads to deeper spiritual deception and corruption. It feeds their pride and hardens their hearts against God. Meanwhile, Christians have preached a false message of weakness and defeat, one that is not only unattractive to sinners but worse, blasphemous to the grace of God and the blood of Christ.
Jesus Christ has the real answer, the real truth. In him, we can say, “I was sinful and worthless. I had potential only for more evil and failure. But then I was born again by the Spirit of God. Jesus Christ saved me, changed me, and empowered me. Now I am the righteousness of God. I am a royal priesthood. This is the worth that God has assigned to me. I have unlimited potential through him, because I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, and he said that all things are possible for one who has faith.”
Terms like “self-help” and “self-improvement” offend religious people, and for this reason I would like to keep using them. All of us ought to relish in torturing faithless religious people by using words that they hate to communicate truths that they hate about the God that they hate. As the Bible teaches, they see but cannot perceive, they hear but cannot understand, so that they cannot repent, and God would not heal or forgive them. This was fulfilled in the ministry of Jesus, and it continues today. If people truly wish to hear and obey God, they would put aside their religious pride and listen even when we communicate using words that offend their human orthodoxy. By hardening themselves and being offended, they condemn themselves.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the ultimate “self-help” and “self-improvement” message. Certainly, we are not helping God or improving God, but ourselves. However, unlike the self-help and self-improvement of sinners, Christians do not help ourselves or improve ourselves by any power that is inherent in us. We reject any suggestion that we can save ourselves from sin and corruption, or that we can do anything meaningful to save our broken relationship with God. The gospel is the message that God has come to save us and restore our relationship with him through Jesus Christ. It is by this message that he helps us and improves us in ways that sinners can never hope to achieve by awakening their corrupt potential.
God produces supernatural and superhuman improvement in us. Beginning from the miracle of regeneration, the gospel is the message of ultimate improvement that transforms and empowers our very selves, and that is at the same time not human-centered but God-centered. God glorifies himself by saving and improving us through Jesus Christ. By this message, we become confident, intelligent, and purposeful, living faith-filled and meaningful lives, even supernatural lives.
We do not say, “God is a new creation in Christ Jesus. The old has passed away with God; behold, everything about God has become new!” That would be blasphemous. No, I am the one born again. I am the new creation. We do not say, “God is the righteousness of God in Christ.” That would be absurd. No, I am the righteousness of God in Christ. The gospel helped myself. The gospel enhances me. You do not say, “God is the temple of the Holy Spirit.” No, I am the temple of the Holy Spirit because of Jesus Christ. You do not say, “Greater is God who is in God, than he who is in the world.” That would be nonsensical. No, greater is he who is in me, than he who is in the world. God is in me, in us. It is not self-centered to apply the gospel to myself, because the gospel is the means by which God saves me, not himself. The effects of the gospel are all about me. God himself never needed the gospel.
Unless I apply the gospel to myself, I do not apply it at all. And when I apply the gospel to myself — this is something that God initiates in me by his grace — I am helped and improved, and I become supernaturally optimistic. I become more positive about myself than sinners can achieve by their self-delusions, but this positive perception about myself is reality. This is where true self-esteem is found. My self-perception is greater than any delusion that I can create for myself, because it comes from an actual identification with Jesus Christ, who is seated in the highest place in heaven. I am the temple of God. I am full of the Holy Spirit to perform miracles. I am given this worth because I have become one with Jesus Christ.
We do not say, “God will cast out demons in the name of Jesus.” No, I will cast out demons. Jesus has given me authority. I tell them what to do in the name of Jesus, not in my own name. To the extent that I think correctly about this, I have as much confidence in myself to cast out demons as I have in Jesus to cast them out, because it is done in his name. I am, so to speak, paying with his credit card. This is proper self-esteem, confidence based on what God is doing in me and through me. A person who understands this will not cower before the opinions of men or the powers of darkness. He knows who he is in Christ, and he knows the authority that has been entrusted to him. My attitude becomes as positive as how great I believe God is, not how great I am. Even the most delusional sinner might not think that he is as great as God. But my confidence can match my estimation of God, because all his resources are available to me through faith in Jesus Christ.
The teachings of self-harm and self-hatred in faithless theology are not the teachings of the Bible. They are not the teachings of Jesus. As the Bible says, “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” The people were suffering under faithless doctrines and human traditions, just like people are suffering these things today. Jesus did not come to push them down the cliff and finish them off, but he came to encourage and empower them. He called them to leave these faithless doctrines and human traditions. It was also why the religious people condemned his message and murdered him.
The Christ of Scripture is the victorious Lord who bestows supernatural and superhuman powers upon his people. Yet human orthodoxy presents believers still as suffering and defeated losers. This reflects their true opinion about Jesus. They have invented a false gospel, one that encourages self-hatred and self-destructive thinking, and one that excuses their lack of faith. This is not orthodoxy according to biblical revelation, but orthodoxy according to the historic agreement of faithless losers, and it must be rejected.
For my own sake, I oppose such false teachings. I refuse to be destroyed by the lies that have bound so many in chains of weakness and false humility. I refuse to harm and condemn myself with faithless human doctrines that have killed countless people in their sickness and depression. And I also oppose it for the sake of others. They need the true gospel to liberate them from the shackles of their vain religious heritage, from the bondage of deceit that keeps them from walking in the fullness of what God has for them. Think for yourself. Will you suffer, will you be condemned and destroyed, so that you can vindicate faithless fantasies that other people have invented? Why would you harm yourself, and why would you blaspheme God, in order to fall in line with human religion?
The world has stolen much from the church, but it has taken only the shell of what is good. Would to God the world would take the whole gospel and be saved! But even the church does not believe the gospel. The world’s imitation lacks true power. Even if it pushes human potential to its limit, it cannot attain superhuman results. And ultimately it leads to death and hell. Those who fail to uphold the optimism and triumph of the gospel are complicit in bringing people to destruction. Christians must return to the gospel, not the gospel of human potential, but the gospel of God’s grace, the power of the reborn spirit, and the worth given to us by Jesus Christ. It is a message that should make everyone who believes it supernaturally competent, virtuous, and positive.