I continue to be amazed by The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. In the passage I read last night (Book 1, Chapter 14) I came across the following:
We often judge of a thing according as we fancy it; for through private affection we easily lose true judgment.
This is one of the most common problems we have today and yet we don't often acknowledge that the problem exists. At the level of the individual that makes some sense because as individuals we don't usually know that we are doing this. A little later in the same passage à Kempis essentially says as much:
Many secretly seek themselves in what they do, and know it not.
So as he says, we often do this and we don't actually know that we are doing it. Unfortunately this isn't something you hear much today in our essentially hedonistic society. Hedonism in our society masquerades as affirmation of the self so we allow it without thinking. There are very few checks on the self that are levied by our culture and this is done purposefully because modern psychology has convinced itself that self-affirmation is central to personal well-being, but these words really mean that the seeking of pleasure is central to happiness. Of course, the notion that the seeking of pleasure is central to happiness is not new, it dates back at least to the 4th century B.C. What is more insidious about what we have done today, however, lies in our inability to acknowledge that what we are doing is elevating the seeking of our pleasure above all else. We invent fancy words for it in an effort to fool ourselves into not understanding what it is that we are really doing. This blinds us to the existence within ourselves of what à Kempis is talking about in the previous quotes which is our uncanny ability to fool ourselves into actually believing that the seeking of our own ends is really what God wants us to do. People will not believe this of themselves if they are doing it. It is very difficult to see until you are out of it on the other side. Many things in life are this way and we are warned against this effect in Proverbs:
There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death. (Proverbs 14:12)
Our duty, then, is to examine our life as it stands now and compare it to what we find in the Bible and when something does not match up not to convince ourselves that somehow we are in the right. This comes down to allowing the Bible to convict us. We do not like to be convicted and we naturally resist this, but the Bible seeks to convict us constantly as we measure up to its perfection. Submission is the key that opens this lock for us, and not self-promotion. In this way we are swimming upstream but we will be happier if we do:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. (Galatians 5:22-23)
