The Pain of Self-Knowledge

Part II: Doorway to the Deep Heart- Calvary and Knowing Your Own Heart

I frequently tell others that the nature of the gift reveals the nature of the need. If one of my sisters gets me balding-crème for my birthday, I realize I may have less hair than I’d like to admit. If my twin brother gets me a gym membership, I’m forced to realize eating M&M’s every day hasn’t been good for the ol’ waistline. You get the picture- the nature of the gift reveals the nature of the need.

The broken body and shed blood at Calvary is a gift that reveals the nature of your heart’s need. Yet, your heart doesn’t want to face this hard reality. As Daniel Goleman, who became internationally famous for his bestseller Emotional Intelligence, has said, “We all have things about ourselves that we notice and strive intentionally not to notice.” Or, perhaps more pointedly, theologian Fleming Rutledge has said in her challenging book The Crucifixion, “The ‘old Adam’ in us does not want the pain of self-knowledge.”

I’d rather listen to the podcasts, movies, social media posts, and commercials that tell me everything is awesome, especially me.

Calvary isn’t only the window you look through to know the heart of God, it’s also the mirror you approach to know your own heart. Isaiah was shattered as his heart was exposed by the glory of God (Is. 6); Peter, in recognizing after a miracle that Jesus was God-in-the-flesh, was broken by the knowledge of his sin. If Calvary, as we saw in the last post, is the greatest display of the glory of God, it painfully exposes- like the latest MRI scanning technology- the disorder, dysfunction, and depravity within that we all would rather deny.

The good news, however, isn’t simply that the nature of the gift reveals the nature of the need but also that the greatness of the cost reveals the depth of love from the Giver. The greater the cost the greater the love and there is no greater love than this- that a person lay down their life for their friends (John 15:13). Not only is his life the cost of your redemption, but it is also the cost of your heart’s transformation as he will increasingly make it to reflect his own.

The cross reveals the redemptive pain of self-knowledge.

It also reveals the depths of his love for hearts like yours.