The Big-Headed Soul

Pride distorts our thinking, making us more willing to heed our own minds than to submit to the mind of God revealed in Scripture. Today, Sinclair Ferguson poses the remedy for sin’s big-headed self-sufficiency.

Welcome to Things Unseen, especially if you’re new today to our weekday podcast. This week, we’ve been thinking about the ways in which our lives can be distorted by sin, the way our souls—that is, our lives as creatures—originally and lovingly made as the image of God to reflect His likeness. We’ve been thinking about the way these souls can be bent out of shape.

I wonder if you ever think this: I might never have been. I did nothing to bring myself into being. More than that, this world might never have been. So my existence, the fact that I have life—I owe it all entirely to God. It’s because that’s actually true that it’s logical, and originally was instinctive for us, to love Him, to live for Him, to want to please Him, and to enjoy Him. When you think about this, how sinful our sin really is because it even blinds us to these basic realities. We don’t see God clearly, we don’t see the world clearly, and we don’t see ourselves clearly. What fools we are to make ourselves the center of the universe when, compared to our glorious Creator, we’re no bigger than ants crawling across the ground. But we strut about the world so full of ourselves, and we need to be reminded of Paul’s words in Romans 9: “Who do you think you are, O man, whoever you are?”

What I’m thinking about here is that one way in which our sin distorts our soul shape is that it causes our heads to inflate with pride and self-sufficiency. We are big-headed souls, and that’s not a pretty sight. What do I mean by this? Well, the big-headed soul comes in various forms, but its basic form is that its mind is not willing to subordinate itself to Scripture—or, to put it simply, not willing to subordinate itself to God and His mind. Paul puts it this way in Romans 8:7–8: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

The diagnostic test of the inflated head is its reaction to that word “cannot.” It’s one thing to say you “do not.” It’s a step further to say “cannot.” You “do not” is a statement about a behavior pattern. You “cannot” is a statement about the very core of your being, about who you are as a person, about your total inability to do something. You are spiritually sick, mortally sick, and you cannot heal yourself. That’s the problem of the soul that has an inflated head. And it’s acknowledging that you’re sick that’s the first step to a cure. Refusing the diagnosis or believing that if there’s a problem you can deal with it yourself and nobody will tell you what you’re not capable of doing—that’s the road that leads to spiritual disaster, and it’s actually the symptom of having this inflated-head soul. You’re exalting your mind above God’s Word, which reveals His mind. It’s your word against the Word of the great physician. And unlike your mind, His mind understands the truth of the matter.

There are many manifestations of this head-enlarged soul, aren’t there? And, alas, some of them remain after the renewal of regeneration has begun. We don’t go straight to glory. There can be pride in the rightness of our own views, and that rears its ugly head from time to time—and not only when our views are wrong and muddle-headed. It can also be the case when our views are actually right, and in some ways, that can be even more dangerous. We hold the right view, but with an inflated-head soul. We hold the right view in the wrong way and in the wrong spirit, and it manifests itself in the way we speak to or about others, and it leaves a very distasteful impression on them.

Being biblical, you see, is not just a matter of getting things right, it’s about being right. And that means holding the truth in the spirit of the truth, in the atmosphere that’s consistent with the truth. Remember how John 1:17 tells us that Jesus is full of grace and truth. And when that’s true of us, then our misshapen, big-headed souls begin to shrink to normal size again.

So, what’s the remedy for the soul shape distortion of big-headedness? Well, remember how Paul writes the prescription in Philippians 2:5–11. It flows out of our union to the Lord Jesus: “Have this mind among yourselves,” he says, “which is yours in Christ Jesus. He made himself nothing.” That translation could be misleading. He didn’t annihilate Himself. No, He humbled Himself for our sakes. He took the servant form in human likeness. His thinking was conformed to the thinking of His heavenly Father. His mind was submitted to the revelation of His will. He was meek and lowly in heart. His soul shape was full of grace and truth. And here on Earth, John and his fellow Apostles felt that they not only heard propositional truth from His lips; they experienced and saw truth in the grace and humility of His life and in His very atmosphere.

Remember how Jesus said that the Spirit would take what belonged to Him and show it to us? That’s what He wants to do now. And more than showing it to us, He wants to heal us, to reshape us to be more like our Lord Jesus. It’s both a relief and a blessing to read that there is medicine for our sick souls, and it lies here in these words of Philippians: “This is the mind that is yours in Christ Jesus.”