When Dying to Yourself Makes You Lose Yourself
I grew up in a culture where “dying to yourself” was treated as one of the highest expressions of spiritual maturity. The more of yourself you could get rid of, the more room there seemed to be for God. Your desires were suspect, your dreams were suspect, your emotions were suspect, and your thoughts were suspect. Anything that arose naturally from within you had to be examined carefully because you had been taught that the self could not be trusted.
I took that seriously. I learned to distrust what I wanted because wanting something could be selfish, and I learned to question what I felt because emotions were unreliable. I learned to second-guess my own thoughts because maybe they were just “me” and not God. Even dreams that stirred something deeply within me had to be held loosely because I had been taught that surrender meant being willing to give up anything I personally wanted.
What began as a sincere desire to live well and honor God slowly became a war against myself. I was constantly trying to determine which parts of me were acceptable and which parts needed to die, and that internal tension became normal to me.
At the same time, I was always trying to get more of God. I could not pray enough, speak in tongues enough, read Scripture enough, worship enough, surrender enough, or spend enough time seeking. There was always this underlying sense that something was missing and that whatever I needed was somewhere outside of me.
If I could just pray longer, seek harder, or surrender deeper, maybe I would finally become the person I was supposed to be. The strange thing was that the further I traveled down that road, the less alive I became.
I began losing touch with myself. I did not know what I liked anymore because liking something seemed spiritually unimportant, and I did not know what I wanted because desire had become selfish. I became so accustomed to filtering myself through religious expectations that I no longer knew who I was.
It reached a point where I realized I did not even know something as simple as my favorite color. That may sound insignificant, but for me it exposed something much deeper. In the name of dying to myself, I had lost myself.
I had become disconnected from my own personality, desires, creativity, instincts, dreams, and uniqueness. I thought I was becoming more spiritual, but in many ways I was becoming less alive.
Looking back now, I can see that much of this was built on a particular understanding of humanity. We were taught to think of ourselves as untrustworthy. We were weak, fallen, sinful, fleshly, and constantly in danger of being deceived by our own hearts, so distrust became a spiritual virtue.
That way of thinking creates a strange contradiction once you begin to take union seriously. We say Christ lives in us. We say we are one spirit, the temple of Spirit, the body of Christ, and people in whom Christ lives. We say that in him we live and move and have our being, yet many of us were still taught to distrust the very place we claim Christ lives.
We confessed union while practicing suspicion of ourselves. The lips confessed union, but the imagination still lived in separation.
That contradiction eventually became impossible for me to ignore. If union is true, then I cannot continue to treat my inner life as enemy territory. If the Life within me is truly one with me, then spiritual maturity cannot consist of constantly dividing myself into two competing parts, one called “God” and the other called “me,” with the assumption that God is trustworthy and I am always the problem. That is not union. It is separation living under religious language.
I Have Been Crucified With Christ
One of the passages often used to reinforce this way of thinking is Galatians 2:20, where Paul says that he has been crucified with Christ and that he no longer lives, but Christ lives in him. I used to hear that as though Paul were describing the disappearance of Paul. Paul had died, Paul had gone away, and now Jesus was somehow occupying his body in his place.
But that is not what Paul says when you slow down and listen to the whole thought. Immediately after saying, “I no longer live,” Paul speaks about “the life I now live.” There is still an “I,” and there is still a person. Paul has not vanished, his personality has not been erased, and his humanity has not been replaced.
The context of Galatians makes this even clearer. Paul is confronting a return to law, circumcision, external qualification, and a way of establishing righteousness and belonging through the old covenantal system.
Just before saying, “I have been crucified with Christ,” Paul says, “Through the law I died to the law so that I might live to God.” That sentence gives Galatians 2:20 its direction because Paul is not describing the death of personality. He is describing the end of a former Old Covenant governing identity.
He died to the law and to the world in which identity was established from the outside. He died to righteousness being measured through law observance and to the old framework that told him who was in, who was out, who was righteous, who was unrighteous, who was clean, who was unclean, who belonged, and who did not. Then Paul says that he lives.
That is what I missed for years. The death in Paul’s language is moving from the old system to Christ. It is not death for the sake of death, and it is not disappearance for the sake of disappearance. It is the ending of an old way of existing so that another reality can finally be lived.
“The life I now live” matters just as much as “I have been crucified.” Paul is not presenting spiritual maturity as the destruction of the person. He is describing a person whose identity is no longer built through separation, law, performance, and external qualification, and who now understands life from Christ within.
This also helps explain why Paul can say, “Christ lives in me,” without meaning, “Paul has ceased to exist.” He is not describing possession or replacement. He is describing union, where the life Paul recognizes as his own can no longer be understood apart from Christ.
Christ within is not the cancellation of Paul. Christ within has become the foundation from which Paul understands himself.
That is very different from the message I grew up with. I was taught that spiritual maturity meant decreasing until there was nothing left of me, while Christ somehow became more visible. Paul seems to be describing something much richer: the false identity falls away so that the person can actually live.
Flesh and Spirit
This changes the way I hear Paul’s language about flesh and Spirit too. For years, I heard “flesh” explained as though it simply meant everything natural, human, embodied, emotional, or desirable.
To walk in the flesh meant being too human. To walk in the Spirit meant rising above your humanity, suppressing your desires, distrusting your body, ignoring your emotions, and becoming increasingly detached from ordinary life.
But that understanding does not hold up very well once we follow Paul’s actual argument. Galatians is especially important because Paul repeatedly contrasts flesh and Spirit in a context dominated by law, circumcision, promise, sonship, inheritance, and freedom.
In Galatians 3 he asks, “Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?” What are they doing that Paul calls “flesh”? They are not being accused of enjoying themselves too much, listening to their emotions, wanting things, or having strong personalities.
They are being pulled back into an old covenant religious system. They are being told that what Christ has accomplished is somehow incomplete unless it is supplemented by circumcision and law observance. They began in Spirit, but someone is now telling them they need external religious qualification to finish the work, and Paul calls that a return to flesh.
That tells us something important about the way he is using the word. Flesh is not simply a synonym for body. It is connected to an entire way of establishing identity and righteousness through what can be accomplished, inherited, measured, marked, and qualified from the outside.
This is why circumcision matters so much throughout Galatians. Circumcision was literally a mark in the flesh, but Paul’s concern goes far beyond a physical procedure because the mark represented an entire old covenantal world.
It represented who belonged, how belonging was identified, and how the people of God were distinguished. It represented natural descent, participation in the law, and an identity marked in the body.
Then Paul comes along and says that in Christ those old boundary lines no longer define humanity. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, because all are one in Christ.
That is the larger movement, and it is why we should be careful not to collapse Paul’s flesh and Spirit language into a simple contrast between bad humanity and good spirituality. He is contrasting two realms, two ways of locating identity, and two ways of understanding life.
The same thing appears in Romans. Romans builds toward liberation from sin, condemnation, and law, and by the time Paul arrives at Romans 8, he is contrasting the mind of the flesh with the mind of the Spirit inside a much larger conversation about the end of condemnation and the arrival of a new governing reality.
He begins Romans 8 by saying there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus because the law of the Spirit of life has liberated from the law of sin and death. The entire passage is saturated with movement from one covenant into another.
That means “flesh” is doing more work in the argument than simply referring to the human body. In fact, Paul goes on to say that Spirit gives life to your mortal body, which means your body is not the enemy of Spirit. Your body is where Life is expressed.
Jesus himself should have settled this for us. John says that the Word became flesh. Whatever negative meaning Paul may give the word “flesh” in certain contexts, it cannot simply mean that human embodiment itself is evil.
The fullest revelation of the Father appeared in human form, and that realization is important because so much religious thinking has effectively taught people that salvation means escaping or suppressing their humanity. Everything becomes suspicious. Desires, emotions, imaginations, ambitions, It all becomes unreliable and suspicious.
The more human something feels, the easier it becomes to label it “flesh.” That is how people learn to become enemies of themselves.
What About the Works of the Flesh?
Even the famous “works of the flesh” passage in Galatians 5 has often been detached from this larger argument. It gets turned into a list of individual bad behaviors that supposedly prove human nature itself is corrupt.
But look at the kinds of things Paul includes. He talks about hatred, rivalry, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissension, factions, and envy. A huge portion of the list is relational.
These are not descriptions of a person being too human. They describe what happens when human beings operate through separation, division, rivalry, control, competition, fear, and fractured identity.
Then look at what Spirit produces. Paul speaks of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, and none of those things make a person less human. They reveal what a flourishing human person looks like.
The person becomes more loving, more peaceful, more joyful, more patient, more whole, more relationally healthy, and more free. The movement is not away from humanity; it is toward humanity fully alive.
That makes the contrast clearer to me. Flesh is not humanity itself. Flesh is humanity being lived from an old realm of separation, external identity, rivalry, law, fear, and self-established righteousness, while Spirit is life from another foundation altogether.
It is life from union, freedom, and within rather than life defined by an external system.
We Were Taught to Distrust Ourselves
Once flesh is misunderstood as humanity itself, something psychologically damaging begins to happen. You start becoming suspicious of everything that arises within you.
A desire appears, and the first question is whether it is flesh. A dream appears, and you wonder whether it is selfish. An idea comes to you, and you ask whether it was God or merely you. An emotion surfaces, and you assume it cannot be trusted.
After enough years of this, distrust becomes second nature. You stop asking what you want because wanting has become wrong, and you stop asking what you enjoy because pleasure feels like a violation. Eventually you can become completely disconnected from yourself and call it maturity.
That is what happened to me. The question, “Was that God or was that me?” became part of the air I breathed. I understand why people ask it because I lived there for years, but now I think the question itself often exposes the separation we were taught.
If Christ is in me, if I am one spirit, and if union is the foundation of my existence, why is “me” automatically the inferior possibility? Why would something becoming my thought make it less trustworthy, and why would a desire arising within me automatically require suspicion?
This does not mean every impulse becomes unquestionable truth. We can be wounded, fear can distort perception, our trauma can shape reactions, our habits can influence behavior, and we can misunderstand ourselves. We can grow in awareness without turning that growth into another reason to despise ourselves.
Discernment is not the same thing as distrust. A whole person can examine a desire without labeling yourself unholy, question a thought without assuming the thinker is corrupt, and recognize fear without believing fear defines them.
There is an enormous difference between awareness and self-hostility. We were taught to call self-distrust humility, but in many cases I now think it was simply disconnection from ourselves.
There is another consequence of this that I do not think we talk about enough. When people are taught not to trust themselves, they become increasingly dependent on someone outside themselves to tell them what is true, what they should do, what God is saying, for direction and whether what they are sensing can be trusted.
If I have been taught that my own thoughts are suspect, my desires are suspect, my emotions are suspect, and even my ability to hear God is suspect, then eventually I will look for somebody else to become the interpreter of my life. That person might be a pastor, a prophet, a spiritual leader, a teacher, or simply someone I believe is more spiritual than I am.
That kind of dependence can easily become normalized in religious communities. People stop trusting their own discernment and begin needing constant confirmation. They need someone else to tell them whether a decision is right, whether a desire is from God, whether a relationship is acceptable, whether they should move, stay, start something, stop something, or take a risk.
At that point, self-distrust is no longer just an internal struggle. It becomes a structure.
A community full of people who have been taught not to trust themselves becomes a community that is easy to control. If people believe truth is always outside of them and must be delivered through someone with greater authority, they become dependent on that authority to function.
That is not maturity.
Healthy influence should not create dependence on another person’s certainty. It should help people become more honest, more aware, more discerning, and more confident in their own ability to recognize truth.
If Christ is within, if Spirit is within, if union is real, then the goal cannot be to keep people permanently dependent on someone else to tell them what God is saying. The goal should be to awaken people to the Life already within them and help them trust what they are learning to recognize there.
That does not eliminate community, wisdom, counsel, or relationship. It simply changes their purpose.
Community is no longer a place where people surrender their discernment. It becomes a place where discernment is strengthened.
Leadership is no longer about becoming the voice people cannot live without. It becomes about helping people hear, see, and trust more clearly for themselves.
The healthiest community is not one where everyone constantly asks, “What does the leader think?” It is one where people are becoming increasingly awake, grounded, whole, and able to live from within.
That kind of community does not need people to stay small. It wants them to become fully alive.
Deny Yourself
That brings us to another passage that has often been used to justify self-rejection. Jesus says, “If anyone wants to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”
I heard those words for years as though Jesus were saying, “Reject everything about yourself.” Deny what you want, deny what you enjoy, deny your plans, deny your personality, deny your dreams, and deny your own voice.
But that is not the context in which Jesus speaks. In Mark 8, Peter has just confessed Jesus as Messiah, and Jesus then begins telling the disciples what lies ahead: rejection, suffering, death, and resurrection.
Peter cannot accept it because his understanding of Messiah does not have room for this path, so Peter rebukes Jesus. That is the immediate setting in which Jesus then turns and speaks about denying self, taking up the cross, and following him.
The conversation is not about personality suppression. It is about letting go of an entire way of imagining power, security, survival, and Messiah.
The cross was an instrument of execution within the Roman world, so taking up the cross meant identification with a path that could cost a person their place within the existing order.
This is why I think we need to distinguish between denying yourself and denying who you are. Those are not the same thing.
Jesus did not tell Peter to lose his personality, John to stop being John, or Mary to become less herself. What is being denied is the self that is trying to secure itself through the old order, the self that has to preserve status, control outcomes, and build identity from systems that are passing away.
That self has to be relinquished if a person is going to follow Jesus into a new reality. This is very different from self-denial we have been taught because it is the release of a false way of constructing yourself.
Whoever Loses His Life Will Find It
That leads directly into another saying of Jesus that was often taught alongside “deny yourself”: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
The saying appears in several forms across the Gospels, and for years I heard it as one more reason to disappear. Lose yourself, lose your desires, lose your dreams, lose your identity, and lose the life you actually want so that God can give you the life he wants you to have. God's not concerned with any of your desires or wants, all that matters is what He wants for you.
But I no longer think that reading does justice to what Jesus is saying. Look at the paradox: if losing your life meant the destruction of who you are, why does Jesus say that losing it results in finding it?
The end result is not nonexistence. The end result is discovery.
You lose your life and you find it, and that changes the entire interpretation. Jesus is not glorifying disappearance. He is exposing the failure of a certain way of trying to preserve life.
The person that was desperately trying to secure life through the existing old Covenant order eventually loses the very thing they were trying to protect. The person willing to let that old way of securing life go discovers life on another foundation… Christ!
This becomes especially clear in Mark 8, where losing life sits directly beside denying self and taking up the cross. Jesus is speaking into a world of competing kingdoms, expectations of Messiah, religious power, social status, and survival under empire.
To follow him could cost people everything that had previously told them who they were. Religious structures could exclude them, family systems could reject them, political power could threaten them, and social belonging could disappear.
Following Jesus into the collapse of that Old Covenant world required releasing the instinct to preserve life by holding tightly to the old order. That is why the language is so sharp, because whoever tries to save life within that arrangement loses it, while whoever releases it discovers life beyond that arrangement.
This is not the death of personhood. It is the death of dependence upon a world that once gave personhood its definition.
The Greek word often translated “life” in these passages is psychē, a word that can carry the sense of life, self, or soul. Jesus is talking about the very life a person is trying to hold onto, and the paradox is that grasping tightly can cause you to lose it while letting go can open you to its discovery.
That is very different from saying God wants you to deny your life. Jesus is not saying your existence is worthless and therefore should be thrown away. He is revealing that life cannot be secured through fear, possessed through control, or preserved by clinging to systems that are passing away.
Sometimes the thing we are afraid to lose is actually the thing keeping us from discovering who we are beyond it. What if the “life” we are being called to lose is the life we constructed under separation, external validation, law, status, fear, the need to prove ourselves, religious identity, and everything other people told us we had to be?
Lose that life, and perhaps you finally discover your life. That sounds very different from how I was taught because I thought losing my life meant losing myself, but maybe Jesus was actually inviting people out of the false life that kept them from knowing themselves.
The Seed That Dies
John 12 gives another image that helps here. Jesus says that unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it bears much fruit.
Religion has often heard “die” and assumed erasing itself is the goal, but the seed does not die so that nothing remains. The seed dies into expression, and something hidden becomes visible as what existed in compressed form breaks open and multiplies.
The death serves the life. That pattern matters because Jesus does not glorify death as an end in itself; death becomes the passage through which another expression of life emerges.
This is very close to what Paul says in Galatians when he speaks of dying to the law so that he might live, and of being crucified with Christ while still speaking of “the life I now live.” The movement keeps coming back to life.
That is why I am no longer comfortable with forms of spirituality that celebrate diminishing people. If an interpretation of death consistently produces fear, repression, personality loss, passivity, and disconnection from life, I think we have every reason to examine whether we understood the language correctly.
Jesus says losing life leads to finding it. Paul says dying leads to living. The seed dies and becomes fruitful. In every case, death is serving life.
“It’s All About Jesus”
There is another phrase that belongs in this conversation because I have heard it most of my life: “It’s all about Jesus.”
I understand what people are trying to communicate when they say it. They are usually attempting to honor Jesus and keep him at the center of their theology, but depending on what we mean by the phrase, it can quietly carry the same theology of self-erasure.
“It’s all about Jesus” can become another way of saying, “It is not about you. You do not matter. Your desires do not matter. Your life does not matter. Your identity does not matter. The more invisible you become, the more spiritual you are.”
I have even heard people say, and I once believed it myself, “When God looks at you, he does not see you. He sees Jesus.” I no longer believe that at all, because when God looks at you, he sees you.
Why would reconciliation result in God refusing to see the person who has been reconciled? Why would union mean that God has to mentally replace you with somebody else in order to accept you?
That idea still assumes the real you is somehow unacceptable. Jesus becomes a screen placed between you and God so that God does not have to deal with who you actually are. That is not union. It is separation with Jesus standing in the middle.
If reconciliation is real, God does not need to pretend you are someone else, and if union is real, you do not need Jesus to hide you from the Father. You are not loved by mistaken identity, accepted because God is looking past you, or tolerated because Jesus is standing in front of you.
God sees you!
And I think that is much closer to the reason Jesus came in the first place. We have sometimes reduced Jesus to the one who saves God from having to see humanity, when Jesus actually came revealing the truth about God and humanity. Jesus reveals the Father, but he also reveals humanity.
If Jesus is the full revelation of the Father, then when we look at Jesus we see what the Father is like. But Jesus also stands before us as a human being, revealing what humanity looks like when it is fully conscious of union.
He does not come to prove that Jesus matters and everybody else does not. He comes to reveal Life in human form. That means when we say “it’s all about Jesus” in a way that removes humanity from the story, we can actually dumb down the very purpose of Jesus coming. Jesus did not come to eliminate you from the conversation; he came to reveal you.
He reveals what humanity looks like without the illusion of separation. He reveals what it looks like for a human being to live from oneness, intimacy, authority, love, freedom, and Life.
Jesus does not stand before humanity saying, “Look at me and see how unlike me you are.” He reveals what has always been true at the foundation of human existence.
This is why the incarnation matters so much to me. If the goal were for humanity to disappear, becoming human would be a strange way to reveal that goal.
The Word became flesh. Life took human form, and the unseen became visible through a human life. Jesus does not reveal God by becoming less human. He reveals the Father through humanity, and that tells me something about humanity too.
Humanity is not the obstacle. Humanity is the expression.
Jesus Did Not Come to Replace You
This changes the way I understand Christ within. For years, I imagined Christ in me almost like two separate lives occupying the same body. There was Jesus, and then there was me, and the spiritual goal was to somehow make Jesus bigger and me smaller.
But that still assumes separation. If union is true, there are not two competing lives fighting for control; there is Life being expressed through humanity.
That means Christ within is not the cancellation of the self. Christ within is the revelation of the self. Jesus is not replacing humanity. Jesus is revealing humanity.
Paul does not say that humanity becomes irrelevant because Christ exists. He calls people the body of Christ, says they are the temple of Spirit, speaks of being one spirit, and speaks of Christ in you.
None of that sounds like erasure. Even the language of the body assumes distinction within union because a body has many members, and the members do not disappear because there is one body.
The eye is still an eye, the hand is still a hand, and the foot is still a foot. Union does not eliminate distinction; it gives distinction a place to flourish.
That means becoming more fully yourself is not a threat to union. It may be one of the clearest expressions of it.
The Tragedy of Religious Dying To Yourself
This is where the modern interpretation becomes so tragic. People have been taught to deny the very qualities through which their lives were meant to find expression.
The person with a strong personality learns to shrink, the curious person stops asking questions, the person with the desire lays that desire down, the passionate person learns to tone themselves down, and the person with a dream puts it on the altar and waits decades in hopes that it comes because they assume wanting something intensely and pursuing it must somehow compete with God.
All of this can happen while we call it surrender. Eventually a person can become devoted to becoming somebody other than the person they actually are.
That is what happened to me. The strange thing is that the more I tried to disappear, the more I thought I was honoring God.
I assumed that if I became smaller, less desirous, void of my own will and less connected to myself, then somehow more of God would be visible. I no longer believe that because I now think one of the clearest expressions of Life is a person who is fully alive.
What Happens When We Stop Treating Ourselves as the Enemy?
A person who stops treating themselves as a battleground can finally begin to engage with who and what they were created to be. They can discover what is actually present within them without immediately judging it.
They can explore what they love, pay attention to what brings them alive, notice what they are good at, listen to desire, engage imagination, and trust themselves enough to create, build, speak, experiment, fail, learn, and grow. They can begin stepping into the fullness of what they are and what they possess.
This begins to dismantle the dumbed-down version of humanity many of us inherited. We were told that being human meant being weak, fallen, sinful, limited, untrustworthy, and dependent on an external God to periodically intervene in our lives.
Yet Scripture repeatedly uses language pointing in another direction. Humanity is made in the image and likeness of God. We are described as God’s offspring, the body of Christ, the temple of Spirit, and one spirit. Christ is within us, and we live and move and have our being in God.
That is not the language of empty, powerless beings trying to acquire Life. It is the language of humanity waking up to what has already been given and what is already true.
This changes how I understand spiritual growth. Growth is not becoming something other than human, importing more Life into an empty vessel, or making room for Christ by reducing yourself. Growth is awakening to what Life already looks like in you and learning to live from it.
Purpose May Be Expression
This also changes how I understand purpose. For years, many of us were taught to think of purpose as a hidden assignment God had written somewhere outside of us.
We had to pray long enough to discover it, wait for signs, look for confirmations, seek prophetic words, and watch for open doors. We worried constantly that we might miss “God’s will.”
That entire way of thinking can keep a person externally dependent for years. But what if purpose is not primarily an assignment hidden somewhere outside of you? What if purpose grows out of expression? What if the things already alive within you are not distractions from purpose but part of the way purpose takes shape?
Your creativity wants to create, your compassion wants to help, your imagination wants to imagine, your strength wants to build, your curiosity wants to explore, and your voice wants to communicate. Maybe purpose is not as hidden as we were told.
Maybe purpose becomes clearer when you stop making yourself a battleground. That does not mean life becomes selfish or self-absorbed. In fact, I think the opposite can happen.
A person who is no longer preoccupied with fixing, suppressing, and distrusting themselves has far more energy available to live, love, create, and contribute. The person who is whole does not need to constantly manage inner division; they can actually be present.
Flourishing Is Not the Enemy
This is where I now see flourishing differently. Flourishing is not some optional side benefit of spiritual life; it may actually be one of the clearest signs that the inner war is ending.
When a person becomes free to fully inhabit who they are, Life has room to move through the whole person. Their humor, creativity, ideas, and dreams come alive, while their relationships become more honest and their body is no longer treated like a battleground.
Their emotions become information rather than threats, and their desires can be listened to instead of automatically silenced. They become increasingly comfortable existing as themselves.
For me, this is not about self-worship. It is about refusing a theology that taught us God is glorified when humanity disappears.
Jesus does not reveal the Father by becoming less human. He reveals Life through humanity.
If Jesus is the full revelation of the Father, then humanity was never the obstacle. Humanity is the place where the unseen becomes visible, which means your humanity is not the thing God has to overcome.
It is the place Life takes form. Your personality is not competing with Spirit, your creativity is not competing with Spirit, your desires are not automatically competing with Spirit, and your uniqueness does not need to be flattened so that you can fit a religious mold.
The goal was never to produce standardized spiritual people who all sound alike, want the same things, dress the same way, use the same language, and suppress whatever makes them unique. Union should do the opposite by making a person more whole.
What Does Life Look Like as Me?
That is why the question has changed so much for me. The question is no longer, “How much of me can disappear?” The question becomes, “What does Life look like as me?”
What does Life look like through this personality, these gifts, these desires, this imagination, this body, and this particular way of seeing the world? Those questions do not lead me toward a smaller version of myself; they lead toward fullness.
That is why Jesus’ words about losing your life now sound almost completely different to me. “Whoever loses his life will find it.”
What if that is not a call to disappear? What if it is an invitation to release everything that has falsely defined us so that we can finally discover life beyond it?
Lose the life built through fear, law, external approval, religious performance, and separation. Lose the life that survives by constantly asking everyone else who you are, and perhaps you begin discovering the life underneath all of it.
The paradox finally makes sense. You let go of the life you constructed, and you discover the Life you actually are. You stop protecting the false self, and the true person has room to breathe. You stop trying to become what religion told you a spiritual person should look like, and you begin finding the person who had been buried underneath all that effort.
Maybe that is why the person who tries to save their life loses it. They become so committed to preserving an identity, system, reputation, status, or way of being that they never discover who they are without it.
The person willing to lose that life discovers something deeper. They discover Life.
The Goal Was Never to Become Less Human
I no longer believe spiritual maturity means becoming less human. The awakening is into the fullness of what humanity actually is.
It is the end of living beneath ourselves because we were taught human beings were inherently deficient. It is the end of treating our own inner life like enemy territory, and it is the end of assuming the safest way to honor God is to distrust everything that comes from within.
It is also the end of imagining that union means God takes over and the human disappears. Union is shared Life, union is inseparability, and union is the discovery that the Life we once imagined somewhere outside of us has been the foundation of our existence all along.
That means recovering yourself is not moving away from God. It may be one of the clearest ways of waking up to what union actually means.
When I look back at the years when I did not even know my own favorite color, I do not see spiritual maturity anymore. I see a person who had become disconnected from himself because he thought disconnection was devotion.
Coming out of that has not made me less serious about Life; it has made me more alive. I am learning to trust myself without making every thought or impulse unquestionable, and I am learning to listen to desire without immediately condemning it.
I am learning to pay attention to what brings me alive. I am learning that creativity is not a distraction, joy does not need a theological defense, and the things that make me uniquely myself are not barriers to Life being expressed.
I am learning that becoming fully alive and becoming fully myself may not be two different journeys. They may be the same journey.
The problem was never that I needed to get rid of myself. The problem was that I had been taught to misunderstand myself. I had been taught to see myself through separation, law, deficiency, suspicion, and fear. I had been taught to treat my humanity as though it were the part of me standing in God’s way.
Now I am beginning to see something very different. The self that needed to die was never the fullness of who I am. It was the false identity built around separation, the person I believed I had to construct under law, the version of myself trying to earn what was already mine, and the identity trying to become what I already was.
What remains on the other side is not emptiness. It is life. It is the life I now live, the discovery that Christ within is not asking me to become less me, and the realization that Jesus did not come to erase humanity but to reveal it. God does not look through me in order to see somebody else; God sees me.
He sees the real me, the person fully alive in union. The more freely I embrace who and what I am, the more freely Life can be expressed.
That is what flourishing really is. It is not becoming something else, but becoming fully alive as the person you were always meant to be.
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If this essay resonated with you, don't let the conversation end here. Urban Eden is more than a collection of articles—it's an ongoing journey of exploring identity, seeing God more clearly, and engaging life more fully.
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Meet Serge
Serge is an author, minister, podcast host, and the founder of Urban Eden Community. his passion is helping people see God more clearly, awaken to who they are, and engage life more fully. Through essays, conversations, books, and community, his hope is to create spaces where people can ask honest questions and discover the life that's already present within them.
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