Self-Actualization Is Not the Goal: What God Wants Instead

Self-actualization is not the goal. Because all you’ll be left with is yourself.

And you are not enough to save yourself.

You’re not enough in your own heart.

You can do nothing for your own heart.

Only Jesus can.

This smacks firmly in the face of self-actualization.

A consecrated heart with no things of this world, no idols, nothing else sitting in my heart except me and God.

Is this possible?

It is, because it is Abraham’s story.

Who would’ve gotten more leeway than Abraham in treating Isaac like the promised son?

With more favor than anything or anyone else in his life.

But God could see how something so good had become an idol in Abraham’s heart.

His love for Isaac had usurped God from the throne of Abraham’s heart.

The very thing God had promised to him became the thing that was coming between them.

So God put Abraham through the paces by asking him to sacrifice Isaac on an altar.

A gruesome request, for sure. But having idols in your heart is a gruesome sin.

“Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” — Genesis 22:12 (NLT)

Idols aren’t just toys or money or your job.

Idols are anything that stand between you and God.

Even good things taken too far.

Talents and abilities can be idols.

Because we self identify with what we can do and make that our whole identity.

If we truly sacrifice that on the altar of our heart, then what are we left with?

Now our identity has to be in something other than what we can do in our own power.

For the Christian, this means our significance comes from the image of God we’re created in and our relationship with Jesus in context of that.

There’s nothing else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​