Biblical Psychology

The passages alluded to in this outline are exclusively from the New Testament; any student can supply Old Testament illustrations for his or her own use.

(a) Greatness. Mark 12:31. (Comp. 2 Thess. 2:3, 4.)

(b) Groveling. Luke 15: 19; Luke 5: 8.

(b) Humility. Matt. 18: 4; Phil. 2: 1-4.

3 SELF-ESTIMATION. John 13: 13-17.

(b) Inferiority. Matt. 5: 19. N. B. Important Definitions.

(1) Self means: — The sum-total of all a man can call "Me" and "Mine."

(2) Selfishness means: — All that gives me pleasure without considering Christ's interests.

(4) Surrendering myself to anything or any one other than our Lord Jesus Christ and His enterprises is the great human crime.

"My total self includes the whole succession of my personal experiences, and it therefore includes that special phase of my conscious life in which I think of myself/ ' Myself is my conscious personality.

There are three divisions to guide our treatment of this subject: Self; Self-seeking; Self -estimation.

(a) Greatness and (b) Groveling. (Luke 18:9-14.) Both of those attitudes are wrong in a final analysis — one " grovels,' ' and the other swells in " greatness," both are expressions of abnormal conditions. Our Lord does not teach the annihilation of self, but He reveals how self can be rightly centered, and the true centre is perfect live to God. (Read 1 Corinthians 13, with this line of thought in your mind, you will understand it in a practical way. "Perfect love" means perfect love towards God, and it takes no account of the evil that is done it. Until I get myself rightly related there, I either grovel or swell in greatness.) The attitudes of conscious greatness or groveling are both of them untrue and needing to be put right. The true centre for myself is Jesus Christ.

(a) Greatness. (Mark 12:31.) The first commandment is not loving my neighbor, but loving God with all my heart, with all my mind, with all my soul and with all my strength, then I can love my neighbor as myself. You will find that this is at the heart of all the revelation in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ revealed the right centre for myself, and revealed that true centre to be God, and personal, passionate devotion to Him; then only shall I be able to show the same love to my fellowmen that God showed to me. Until I get there, I will either take the position of the Pharisee, or I will take the position of the publican. I will either thank God that I am not an out-and-out sinner, and point out certain people who are worse than I am; or else I will grovel in the other extreme. Both attitudes are wrong because they have not been truly centred. How could this Pharisee love his neighbor as himself? It was impossible, he had not gotten the true centre for himself. Self-realization was his centre, and every time he compared himself with the publican, instead of loving the publican, it increased his self-conceit. Immediately I get rightly related to God, have perfect love toward Him, then I have the same relationship to my fellowmen that God has to me. I can love my fellowmen as I love myself. That is the thing that keeps a man from taking account of the evil that is done towards him. If I love my God best, base ingratitude to me I take no account 6i because the mainspring of my service to my fellowmen arises from my love to God. When a man gets rightly related by the atonement of Jesus Christ to God, he begins to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he said, "We do not preach ourselves (selfrealization), but we preach Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake." The point is very practical and clear, if you will look at it for one moment. If I love a person very much and he treats me unkindly and ungenerously, the very fact that I love him makes me feel it all the more, and yet Paul says, "Love taketh no account of the evil that is done to it." Why? Because self is absorbed, and taken up with love to

Jesus Christ, and certainly if you are going to live for the service of your fellowmen, you are going to be pierced through with many sorrows, unless you love God. You are going to meet with more base ingratitude from your fellowmen than you would from a dog, and you will meet with unkindness and "twofacedness," and if your motive is love for your fellowmen, you will be exhausted in the battle of life; but if your motive springs from a central love to God, there is no ingratitude, no sin, no devil, no angel can hinder you from serving your fellowmen, no matter how they1 treat you, because the mainspring of the service is love to God. Then I can love my neighbor as myself, not from pity, but from the real and the true centering of myself in God.

•(b) Groveling. "And am no more worthy to be called thy son, make me as one of thy hired servants." (Luke 15:19.) "When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, 'Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, 0 Lord.' " (Luke 5:8.) This is a stage everyone goes through when convicted of sin, and we always get a wrong estimate of ourselves when we are convicted of sin. The prodigal's estimate of himself is beyond where the father placed it, and whenever we are convicted of sin by the Spirit of God the same thing happens. The balance is upset, the health of our body is upset, the health of our mind and our heart is upset, the balance is pushed right out by conviction of sin. Sin is a thing that puts man's self out of centre altogether — eccentric — and when the Spirit of God convicts him, the man is wrongly related to everything. He knows he is wrongly related to God and to his own body, and to everything round about him, and he is in a state of abject misery. The other picture is the one we first dealt with, the picture of a man who who is not convicted of sin, and who consequently takes himself to be as God. If you watch carefully the tendencies that are all around us to-day, you will find that that is the characteristic tendency: "ignore sin; deny it ever was; if you make mistakes, forget them; live the healthy-minded, open-hearted, sunshiny life; do not allow yourself to be convicted of sin." They tell you that as you realize yourself to be God, you will attain perfeetness. There is no repentance, no conviction of sin, and no forgiveness of sin. The Holy Spirit opens, not only my eyes, but my heart and my conscience to the horror of the thing that is wrong inside, and immediately He does, I get to the groveling stage. Conviction of sin consumes a man's beauty, the Psalmist says, "like the moth." His "beauty" means the perfectly ordered completeness of his whole nature. The Pharisee doesn't grovel, there is a certain beauty of order about a conceited man, a certain conformity with himself. He feels all right, he is of the nature of a crystal, clear and compact and hard. Immediately the Spirit of God convicts him, all the hardness crumbles and he comes to the opposite extreme, in solution, as it were. Jesus Christ's salvation takes a man that has been broken on the wheel by conviction of sin, and been rendered plastic by the Spirit, and re-moulds him and makes him a vessel fit for God's glory. Self, then, is not to be annihilated, it is to be rightly centralized in God. Self-realization has to be turned into Christ-realization. Our Lord never taught "deeper death to self," He taught deeth, right out, to "my right to myself," to my own self-realization. He taught that the principal purpose of my creation is "to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever," and the whole sum total of my life is to be consciously centered in God.

2. Self -Seeking. (Rom. 15:1-3.)

Romans 15: 3 holds the whole thing in explanation. The "reproaches of those that reproached Thee fell on me. ' ' What reproaches fell on Jesus? Everything that was hurled against God in slander, hurt our Lord. The slanders that were hurled against Jesus Christ Himself never touched Him, they made not the slightest impression on Him, His suffering was on account of His Father. On what account do you suffer? Do you suffer because men speak ill of you? Read Hebrews 12:2: "Consider Him that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be weary and faint in your minds." Perfect love taketh no account of the evil that is done unto it. It is the reproaches that hit and scandalize the true centre of Christ's life that He noticed in pain. What was the true centre of Christ's life? Absolute devotion to God the Father's will, and as surely as you get Christ-centralized you will understand what the apostle Paul meant w;hen he said, "Filling up what remains behind of His sufferings." You could not touch Christ on the line of self-pity. The whole practical emphasis here is that service is not from pity, but from a personal, passionate love to God, longing to see many more brought into the centre where God has brought us.

(a) Honor. (John 5:41-44; 8:49.) The whole centre of the honor of our Lord's life was His Father's. He was " without reputation." They heaped every kind of scandal it was possible for them to think of on the name of Jesus Christ, and He never once attempted to clear Himself. But once let a man or woman show any attitude of dishonor toward His Father, and instantly you see Jesus Christ ablaze in zeal; "and as He is, so are we in this world/ ' says St. John. He changes the centre of our self-love. What is my honor? Is my honor God's honor? Are they identically the same, as they were in Jesus Christ? Let the following sentences analyze us: We are scandalizeci at immorality. Why? Because God's honor is at stake*? Is it not rather because our social honor is upset and antagonized. As saints, we should smart and suffer keenly every time we see pride, covetousness, self-realization, because these are the things that go against God's honor. God's honor and the honor of His saints are one and the same thing. "You have not the love of God in you," said Jesus Christ, and He also pointed out that it was a moral impossibility for them to believe. There is not any man who can believe in Jesus Christ who has another standard of honor. Jesus Christ exalts the standard of honor, and puts it alongside God's throne. Take the eleventh chapter of John. What was the real under-current? "He was moved with indignation" because their attitude accepted the scandal against His Father. As soon as death came on the scene, they accepted its interpretation against all God's goodness. The only thing that ever roused Jesus Christ was the thing that brought His Father's honor into disrepute. In the temple, instead of seeing "a meek and gentle" Jesus, we see a* terrible Being with a whip of small cords in His hands.

"Why could not He have driven them out in a gentler way? Because passionate zeal had eaten Him up, the enthusiasm and detestation against everything that dared to call into dishonor His Father's honor moved Him, and you will find exactly the same characteristics in the saints. You cannot rouse them on the line of personal interest, you cannot rouse them along, the line of self-pity, you cannot rouse them along the line of self-realization; but once let a thing go contrary to Jesus Christ's honor, and instantly you will find your' meek and gentle saint a holy terror. The meaning of that phrase in the Bible, "the wrath of the Lamb" is realisable along this line. The obverse side of love is hate.

(b) Humility. (Matt. 18: 4; Phil. 2: 1-4.) Those two passages in the New; Testament are a wonderful revelation, viz.: that the true disposition of a saint manifested in this order of things is humility. Take the case of the little child. The disciples had been discussing who would be the greater, and Jesus took a very little child in His arms, and said, "Unless you become like that, you will never" see the kingdom of Heaven." Now, did He put that little child up as an ideal? If

He did, He destroyed the whole principle of His teaching. If humility is an ideal, this will increase pride. Humility is not an ideal, humility is the unconscious result of life being rightly related to God and centred in Him. Our Lord is pulling down ambition, and if He put a little child as a. standard for men, He simply altered pride's manifestation, that is all. But He did not. "What is a little child? "We all know What a child is. until we are asked, and then we do not know. We can only mention its extra goodness or badness, but neither of those is the child. We all know implicitly what a child is, and we all know implicitly what Jesus Christ meant, but immediately you try to put it into words, it escapes. Language won't bear the strain you have to put upon it to define a little chili We can only come near a description of it. The child works from an unconscious principle inside, and if we are born again of the Spirit of Ood and follow and obey the Spirit of God, we will manifest this humility unconsciously all along the line. We will easily be the servant of all men, because we cannot help it, not because it is our ideal. Our conscious eye is not on our service, but on our Savior.

There is nothing more awful in this world than conscious humility, it is the most Satanic type of pride. A person who consciously serves you is worse than the Pharisee who is eaten up with conceit. Jesus Christ did not raise humility as an ideal; He presented it, like He did the Sermon on the Mount, as a description of what we will be unconsciously when we are* rightly related to God and rightly centred. Our centre will be God's honor, and our humility among men will never be understood byanybody who is not Christ-centred in the same manner. This attitude is portrayed over and over again. Peter said, "They do not understand why you do not go to the same excess of riot you used to." Jesus says, "Leap for joy when men separate you from their company for My name's sake." The centre of the life is altered, and the worldling is hopelessly "at sea" in trying to find out the centre from which the Christian works, and it ends for the worldling's mind in ridicule. The end of the analysis of a Christian from a worldly standpoint is not attraction, but ridicule. The apostle Paul said that what he preached was to the Greeks (the people who sought wisdom) stupidity, unutterable stupidity, and you will find the same is the attitude of the dispensation we live in to-day. A saint arouses interest for a little while; when things go ill he arouses deep interest, but when things go well, the interest gradually changes into ridicule, and then into absolute ignoring, because the centre of life is altered, centred in some one the world does not see — God! Immediately the Christian complies to standards of this world, instantly the world recognizes it, but when a Christian works from the real standard, which is God, the world cannot recognize it, cannot understand it, and consequently has to ignore or ridicule it. You will find strong antagonism pointed out by Jesus over and over again, and in the Epistles, by the Spirit, between the spirit of the world and the Spirit of God, a, deeply rooted antagonism, and what we have to realize as Christian people more and more is that if we are going to obey the Spirit of God, we are going to be detested and ridiculed and ignored by the people who are centred in self-realization.

Our attitude in a dispensation like this will manifest itself in humility that cannot sting us into action on our own account. That is the thing that maddens the " prince of this world/ ' but once let the prince of this world and his minions scandalize Jesus Christ, begin to misrepresent Him, and the weakest saint becomes a giant, and will go to martyrdom any time and anywhere all the world over for the Lord Jesus Christ. (You hear it said to-day that the spirit of martyrdom has died out; the spirit of martyrdom is here. Let any scandal arise against Jesus Christ, and where you had one martyr in the past you will have many to-day who will stand true to the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ.)

What is my self-seeking? I have to have selfseeking. If my self is truly centred, my seeking is God's honor. God's honor is at stake by my eyes, by my hands and feet, His honor is at stake wherever I take my body. I am the temple of the Holy Ghost, therefore I have to see that this body is the obedient slave of the disposition Jesus Christ put in to stand for Him. My self-centredness is to be God, and love for Him. Suppos ethis question arises, "I believe that I ought to love God like this, but how am I going to do it? Where am I to begin to let the tremendous flow of love toward God come in? I agree emphatically that I ought to love God, but how; can I?"

Romans 5: 5 is a very practical solution: "Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us." Have you received the Holy Spirit? If not, Luke 11:13 will help you: "If ye then being evil know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?" Also the last verse in John 17: "That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them." Ask God to answer Jesus Christ's prayer. There is no excuse for any person not having the problem answered in his own life. My natural heart is not the lover of God; the Holy Ghost is the lover of God, and immediately He comes in He will turn my heart into a loving centre for God; personal, passionate, overwhelming devotion to Jesus Christ. (God and Jesus Christ are synonymous terms in our practical experience.) When the Holy Spirit comes in, and sin and self-interest are in the road, He will instantly discern them to us, and we will have to give our consent that He clears them out. He will clear the whole lot out as soon as we give our consent, until the body is incandescent with this love to God. Jude says, "Keep yourselves in the love of God. ' ' That does not mean, keep on loving God, it is infinitely profounder than that. It means, "Keep your soul open to the fact that God loves you," and His love will be continually flowing through you to others.

Two terms of modern psychology are of importance here — ' ' Projective ' ' and ' ' E jective. ' ' Projective means thai I see in another person the qualities I have not got, but want. Ejective means that I attribute my qualities and my defects to the other person. The latter is the most remarkable line of solution for judging. When I come to the ejective method, I go on this line, "Yes, I know exactly what that person meant.' ' "When somebody has trespassed against me, instantly I impute to him every mean motive I would have been guilty of if I had been in his condition. "Therefore thou art inexcusable, thou that judgest. ' ' In the sixth chapter of Matthew, Jesus puts the forgiveness of my trespasses on the ground that I forgive the people that trespass against me, and if I go on the ejective method, I won't forgive. I simply attribute to them what I would be capable of doing myself in the way of meanness in similar circumstances. The statement that we only see what we bring with us the power of seeing, is perfectly correct. If you see meanness and wrong and evil in other persons, then take the self -judgment at once — that is what you would be guilty of if you were in their condition. The searching light of the Scriptures comes over and over again on that line, and we find out when we come to the last point, Self-estimation, that there is no room in any Christian for cynicism.

3. Self -Estimation. (John 13:13-17.) That is an iteration of the same point, viz.: that myself must be truly centred in God. Is it? Is my self Christ-centred or self-centred? When I am in difficult circumstances, does the disposition in me make me say, "Now, why has this happened to me?" That disposition was never in the Lord Jesus Christ. Every set of circumstances He ever got into, whenever His consciousness showed itself, it was His Father's honor, not His own that occupied Him. "Myself " is a human edition for God to glorify Himself by. "Let this mind "be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.'' (Phil. 2: 5.) Could anything be more practical than that statement, or more profound? The mind of man shows itself in his speech and in his actions. The mind of Christ showed itself in His actions and in His speech. Did you ever notice what it was that Satan antagonised in Jesus Christ? God-realization. He wanted to alter that centre. "Do God's work your own way, you are His Son, work from that centre. " "I came not to do My will, but the will of Him that sent Me," is our Lord's implied meaning all the way through the temptations; and as He was tempted, so are we when once we are rightly related to God through Him. Take that passage in Revelation: "I have this against you, you have left your first love." All the rest become? of no account. To get eccentric, off the centre, is exactly what Satan wants us to do. He does not goad or tempt to immorality; one thing he makes his business, and that is to dethrone God's rule in the heart. The superiority of Christ's self was that He was God-centered. Is that the superiority of yourself? "He that gathereth not with me scattereth," our Lord said, and all morality, all goodness, all religion, and all spirituality that is not Christ-centered is drawing away from Jesus Christ all the time. All the teaching of Jesus weaves round the question of self. It is, "Oh, to be something, something!" aggressively and powerfully something, uncrushably something, something that stands next to God's throne, on the rock, in whom God can walk and talk and move and do what He likes, because the self is personally in love with God, not absorbed into God, but a personal, passionate love to God.

Look at the "N. B.V in the outline. The one we need particularly to notice is " Selfishness/ ' Selfishness means all that gives me pleasure without considering Christ 's interest. If you talk about selfishness and its badness, you are going to have the sympathy of everybody; but if you talk about unselfishness from Jesus Christ's standpoint, you are going to arouse the interest of very few and the antipathy of a great many. Have you ever noticed that my sympathy for my fellowmen is quite likely to rouse my antagonism to God? Unless I have my relationship to God right, my sympathy for man will lead me and them astray; but immediately I get right with God, then I can love my neighbor as myself. How did God love me? He loved me to the end of my sinfulness, all my self-will, all my selfishness, all my stiff-neckedness, all my pride, and all my self-interest. Then I can show my neighbor the same love. That is Christianity in practical working order, "Love as I have loved you." The same love, the same overflow and the same outflow that God showed to me shall I show to my fellowmen.

Then we will take Surrender. We have dealt with this subject often enough — surrendering myself to any one or anything other than Jesus Christ and His enterprises is the great human crime.