Living Hope

Pastor Philip Miller: Listen, if your task in life is to build your life on your own self, you're always going to be wondering if you're enough. Am I special enough? Am I real enough? Am I authentic enough? Am I unique enough?

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and we're so glad you joined us for this series through the Sermon on the Mount. Now, Pastor Philip, we're constantly told today that the key to real happiness is you just got to be yourself. But some people may be saying, I don't really think myself is enough.

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, we're haunted by that idea, aren't we? There's all this pressure. All the movies, all the books, all the music, it's telling us be yourself, you do you. You're a created spark of glory, just shine in the universe, all this kind of stuff. But then deep down we're haunted by this idea of, well what if I'm not enough? What if there's not enough beauty inside? What if there's something wrong with me?

We're haunted by these ideas. The reality is expressive individualism, that's what we're talking about today and how the gospel intersects with that and critiques it and gives a better way. Expressive individualism puts all this pressure on us to go build a life based off of ourself. But the problem is it never actually works.

We're not big enough, strong enough, there's not enough substance in who we are to actually secure our own lives. We need something better. We need a life built on a stronger rock, and that rock is Jesus and the gospel and the identity that he offers us, which is better than anything we could ever build ourselves. So that's where we're going today.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Listen, you want to stay tuned. We're going to break some chains open today. We're going to liberate some folks today. Because after the message, Pastor Philip is going to help us face that social pressure to be yourself. But now, let's go to the pulpit of the Moody Church for part two of the sermon, Built for Life.

Pastor Philip Miller: Expressive individualism. Expressive individualism. In his masterful book, *Habits of the Heart*, Robert Bellah traces the development of expressive individualism from its seed form in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of the inner psychological autobiography and the poetry of Walt Whitman, as it has advanced now to the kinds of slogans that just simply saturate our world. Things like be true to yourself, find yourself, follow your heart, be yourself, or my favorite: you do you.

Yuval Levin says in *The Fractured Republic*: "This term expressive individualism suggests not only a desire to pursue one's own path, but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one's own identity. It's a drive to be more like whatever you already are, and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their own personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding."

Charles Taylor in *A Secular Age* writes that the understanding of life which emerges with the romantic expressivism of the late 18th century, that each one of us has his or her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside by society or the previous generation or religious or political authority.

As Mark Sayers puts it in *Disappearing Church*, the highest good is individual freedom, happiness, self-definition, and self-expression. In expressive individualism, life is about finding our deepest inner self and expressing it authentically in the face of all expectations. So if you want a whole and happy life, be yourself. This is how it goes. Be yourself. Look inside yourself. Where? I don't know, but just look in and find the inner spark of who you are.

And in the face of everyone's expectations—family, societal, moral, religious, whatever—express that identity to the world and say, "This is me." And of course, there's two criteria embedded in here. Whatever identity you find has to be contrary to the expectations of the traditional authorities in your life, and it has to fit with the progressive culture of the moment. Because if you don't do it quite right, you get canceled.

It's got to be different from what your parents would want or your religion would want or traditional culture would want. It's got to be different. And it's got to be in conformity with the societal expectations of the moment, which are ever-changing. But it has to conform or you get canceled. So those are the two criteria.

And again, Elsa, *Frozen*, depicts this so well in another song, "Let it Go." As she casts off the moral structures of her upbringing and lets it go, listen to these words: "It's time to see what I can do to test the limits and break through. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I'm free." Do you see? That's a religion there. That's a whole life philosophy. That's our cultural moment. You'll see it in marketing and advertising, in music and cinema. It's inescapable.

And it's so deceptive because it's partially true. Because God did make you with unique beauties that are personal to you, that are meant to be shared with the world. It's true that moralism engenders a kind of fear that makes people run and hide. And there is real freedom in coming out into the light and being known. And yet this is not the gospel. It's not the gospel. Expressive individualism is sand. If you try to build your life on it, it's shifting and shaking and sinking.

For example, it gives you an identity that is full of endless searching. Friends, if you look down inside yourself, what you will find is not a neatly ordered, unified self like you could just go down there and go, "Ah, there I am. This is me." No, it's not that simple. What we find on the inside of ourselves is rather fragmented, robustly complex, and actually highly conflicted.

Deep down, for example, deep down I want to be free. I want to be utterly free and unencumbered. I don't want anybody telling me what to do. And I also want to be loved and to love in return. And I can't have both. If I'm in love, I have to surrender part of my freedom. Because love requires sacrifice, doesn't it? I have to give up freedom for love. So which one am I? Am I the guy that wants freedom or the guy that wants love?

Another example: Am I the guy who wants to be skinny, or am I the guy who likes deep dish pizza? Or am I the guy who kicks himself after he eats deep dish pizza? Or am I the guy who makes light of it by telling a little bit of a joke on Sunday morning? Am I who I am today, or am I who I was 10 years ago, or am I who I will be in 10 years?

How many of you look back on yourself 10 years ago and go, "Oh man, what a fool. I'm so glad I'm not that guy anymore"? Well, you know your 10-year-old future self thinks that about you right now, right? So which one do you build your life on? Am I fixed and immovable inside, or am I malleable and growing?

If we're honest, we have good days, we have bad days. Sometimes I want to party, sometimes I want to be alone. Sometimes I'm feeling super creative, sometimes I'm like super highly logical. Much of the time, I don't even know which way is up. I'm super confused about whoever I am. I don't know why I did what I did. I don't know why I feel the way I feel. And I find myself thinking far too often, "I'm just not myself today." Well, if you're not yourself, who are you?

Here's the point: you'll never get to the bottom of yourself. To know yourself is an endless search. And it's pretty lousy to do it on your own. If you try to build your life on what's on the inside of you, it's sinking sand. It's not a great place to build your life. And it leads to a heart that's dominated by anxiousness. Your life is full of anxiousness.

If your task in life is to build your life on your own self, you're always going to be wondering if you're enough. Am I special enough? Am I real enough? Am I authentic enough? Am I unique enough? And because we're all filtering—you can't be everything that's inside of you because you're mutually conflicting, contradictory—you're always filtering. And then you wonder, did I let the right part of me out? Did I choose well?

And the culture is always changing, and who I was in one moment that was celebrated might be taboo next year. Which leads to a life of loneliness. It's a life of loneliness because, listen, if you reject outside acceptance by definition and you're left with an expressive individualism, by definition you're by yourself. You're alone. It's like Elsa tells Anna, "I'm alone, but I'm alone and free," right? Eventually the loneliness catches up to us.

And in the end, when hardship hits our lives, it triggers despair. Because whatever inner spark you build your life on, friends, one day will get lost. What do I mean? You build your life on intellect or beauty or artistry or sexuality or athleticism or your wit or your creativity; eventually age and infirmity and mental decline will come and take it all. And that means the end is crushing.

Friends, it's an enormous weight to carry your own self-definition all the way through to the end of your life. It's an enormously crushing weight to have to be yourself and be successful in whatever that means. We're always haunted by the self we could be. We're never enough. If you try to build your life on yourself, it simply cannot support the weight of your own soul. It won't be enough to handle the pressures in life that come your way, and in the end it collapses. Expressive individualism, friends, it's sinking sand.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and before we start our discussion today, I want to let you know that this program is made possible because of generous supporters just like you. And as a thank you for your gift today, we have a resource we'd love to share with you. Go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us: 1-800-215-5001. We're glad you've joined us today as we look at the quest for meaning.

Pastor Philip, it sounds like expressive individualism—it's really a powerful lie. It's so comfortable, it's so easy for us to just fall into it, to adopt it. And that's what makes it so dangerous, isn't it?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, I mean it's everywhere, right? It's in our songs, it's in our movies. My kids and I, we laugh at it, how often in movies the key moment is like, "Well what does your heart tell you? You need to follow your heart. You need to be true to yourself. Live your truth. You be you." I mean it's just so scripted in our cultural moment.

And really the reason for it is expressive individualism is really a reaction to more traditional cultures that would tell people that the script for your life is to live into the expectations of your parents, your family, your clan, your society, your culture. In other words, you're handed a script. Like if you were growing up in certain cultures and like so, I'm a Miller, and so my ancestors apparently milled grain and that was part of their vocation.

So I would not have the choice many years ago of what kind of career I was going to have. I was going to be a husband and a father and I was going to go work at the mill. And so that's your life. It's sort of scripted out and if you want to have honor and reputation and be thought well of in the community, you're going to follow the script. And that can be very confining to have limited options.

So there's a shadow side to those traditional cultures that put all those expectations on people. It was confining and it was restrictive. And so what we've done as a culture is we've swung the pendulum as far as possible in the other direction. And we say, well don't care about what your family thinks, don't care about society or culture or whatever. You do you.

The key here is you get to pursue your own life, your dreams, without reference to anyone else and their expectations. As a matter of fact, the real heroic act is to go act in defiance of the expectations of those around you because that's how you know you're being authentic to yourself. So whatever your parents want, you do the opposite. Whatever's normal, you be unique and nonconformist. It just shifts the whole thing. But it doesn't work.

It's an attractive lie because it's feeding the shadow side of more traditional honor-based cultures where you have to follow the script in order to get honor and know who you are. So it gives you a different path for identity formation. But it really is a lie and it doesn't work for us because we were never meant to carry the weight of our own self-definition. It puts enormous pressure on people.

When we tell kids, "You know you can be anything you want in life. You can be president, you can be an astronaut, you can do this." Do you realize for 99.9% of those kids, that's not actually true? Now we want to believe in the potential of it, but when we raise people's dreams to the point where everything's possible, it actually sets everyone up eventually to fail and to feel like they're not enough.

So when you put all the freight of identity formation on a person's shoulders and say you follow your heart, follow your dreams, follow yourself, you have to define your entire existence, justify who you are, and build a life full of meaning and purpose so that you can carry all of that through life, that's an enormous crippling amount of weight to put on someone. It's a huge burden. No wonder everyone feels like they're not enough.

And then deep down we're conflicted. So you say follow your heart—well which part of my heart? My heart's all over the place. And we're conflicted. And so the reality is it doesn't acknowledge the fact that our hearts are very complicated. And not only that, the Bible will tell us that the heart is actually wicked. It's deceitful above all else. You can't even know your own heart.

And so the heart is actually—because deep down we have not just beauty in our hearts because we're made in the image of God. That part's true. And so yes, there's great beauty in us that needs to be unfurled and God's intention is to fan that into flame in our lives so that we can contribute goodness to the world. So that part's true. That's why lies, the most effective lies, always have an element of truth.

But what expressive individualism doesn't account for is the fact that there's not just great beauty in me, there's also great brokenness in me. And that brokenness needs to be dealt with. And so if you say follow your heart—well the beautiful parts, that's easy to say yes to, but what about the broken parts?

What do I do with the parts of me that I know are inherently flawed, that are actually misaligned, they're not glorifying to God? What do I do with that? I can't follow that part of my heart. If I do, it's going to lead to all kinds of problems. And we see that in society and culture as well. When people find the brokenness and they say, "Well it's in me, so I've got to be me." Well now that's a path not worth following, right? And that leads to all kinds of other problems.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Well speaking about other problems, not only is expressive individualism bad for us, but it's bad for others and the people we're in relationships with. It spins out from there.

Pastor Philip Miller: It's so corrosive. When all you live for is yourself, by definition you're forgetting all the people around you—your family, your friends, your society, your culture, your neighborhood. When you define the purpose of life as just being me, you start doing it without reference to how it's affecting anyone else around you and it has a massively corrosive effect on other people.

And you end up lonely because being you is not going to forge deep bonds of friendship and love and sacrifice and self-giving. That's what community is built on. But you be you is never going to lead to that. So it destroys community. And we end up bowling alone. We end up sitting on our phones by ourselves with a million connections and no friends and no one to really know us. And so it's actually really sad.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Link this up for us now. We have a creator. We're created for a purpose. He created us for a purpose. So what's the significance of our creator knowing us fully?

Pastor Philip Miller: I mean this is the beauty of the gospel, right? So the gospel comes into us and first of all, the gospel says—it starts with good news. We were all made in the image of God to have a relationship with God. He's given us deep beauty. He's shared with us his very character design. We were meant to contribute great and beautiful things to this world. So that's how it starts.

Now the bad news is we've all rebelled against God. And that means there's brokenness and sin and curse that is shot through all of our souls and all of creation, all of our being. So every part of our soul is now a blend—a marbled blend of beauty and brokenness at once. And that's part of our problem, right? Well it's the essence of our problem. We're estranged from God because of our rebellion, because of the sin in our lives.

The hearts that we have now cannot be followed. But the good news is that Jesus came all the way down, died in our place for our sake. He gave his life for us so we can be reconciled to God. And the Holy Spirit can now come into our lives and start sorting out the mess in our heart so that the Holy Spirit can now breathe life into the great beauty that was part of our design, that was always meant to go out in the world and unleash all the goodness that God's created us to be a part of.

And the Holy Spirit can start to correct the brokenness and start taking those pieces and start mending us from the inside out. Now that project is not going to happen 100% on day one. That's going to take a long time and honestly we've got to eventually go to glory before that project is actually going to be finished and so we're never going to be perfect this side of that. But it's a journey that is wonderful.

And so we're following not our hearts, but Jesus. We're following the Holy Spirit. We're allowing him to lead us and guide us, to define what's good and true and real and beautiful and start living in conformity with what that is. And so it's not the confines of traditional culture and it's not the libertarian-like no rules of expressive individualism.

It's actually this wise place where we've got God showing us the right way in which to live and curating our souls to grow in that direction. It's not coercive and it's not wide-open freedom, but it's actually a life that's on the rails, the rails we were created to run on. And there's great beauty in that, and it accounts for all the pieces of our lives.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Oh, there's great truth and liberty in that beloved. God loves you. He died for you. He knows everything about you and he still loves you. Now we're offering the brand-new book *Marx and Moody* by Pastor Erwin Lutzer and Dr. Gregg Quiggle. This book holds two worldviews up to the light and shows where true freedom is found—in Christ.

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You can also write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. For the Christian, freedom rests on what's unshakable and next time we'll talk about how the gospel is our firm foundation. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.