Turned In on Ourselves

Martin Luther described our sinful condition as being “incurvatus in se,” turned in on itself. Today, Sinclair Ferguson identifies the damaging effects of living for ourselves and the transformative way that Christ reshapes us.

We started thinking yesterday about what I’ve called “soul shapes.” What makes human beings different and special is not that they have souls per se; the same language is used of animals in the Bible. Rather, it’s that our souls, we ourselves, have been given a unique shape. We are made as God’s image, meant to be like Him, to reflect His glory, and as the catechism says, not only to glorify Him but to enjoy Him forever. But we’ve sinned. We’ve lost that likeness. We are bent out of shape. We are twisted. It’s a bit like what happens if instead of going into drive in your automatic car, you make the mistake of going into reverse gear. That’s our basic problem. That’s what sin does. It distorts the shape of what the Old Testament calls my nefesh, my soul.

Now, yesterday, I said I wanted to think with you this week about some of these soul shapes, and there are as many of them as there are people, so we’re not planning to write an entire spiritual anatomy and physiology textbook here. We’re drawing only a few of the most common soul shapes.

And the first one may ring a bell with some of us. In fact, it’s been known about for centuries, and it even has a Latin name. Martin Luther diagnosed it in the early sixteenth century, and perhaps you are familiar with the condition. This soul shape, or perhaps better, soul misshape, is what he called being incurvatus in se, being turned in on ourselves. It’s what Saint Augustine meant when he said that there are two ultimate loves: love of God and love of self. We can only love ourselves in the proper biblical sense when we see ourselves as created by God as His image-bearers, and we live as His likeness and for His glory. When we turn away from that in our sin, we fall short of His glory. Something becomes distorted. We focus on ourselves, and everything we do, either obviously or subtly, becomes part of a new liturgy of self-centeredness.

As the English archbishop, William Temple, said so well, our sin means that we make ourselves, in a thousand different ways, the center of the universe. But then our soul is bent over, turned in on itself, separates itself from the source of true life and nourishment, and eventually starves itself of spiritual oxygen, shrivels up, becomes hard, and dies.

I wonder if you know that remarkable passage in C.S. Lewis’ imaginative book The Great Divorce. In the book, he portrays a bus full of people coming from hell to heaven for a short visit, and he describes how they cut their feet on the grass of heaven because it’s too substantial for them to walk on. Yes, I know shrunken souls can create their own very substantial looking exterior self, and you and I can be past masters at doing that. But the soul that lives for itself, however carefully disguised, cannot remain hidden forever. Its godlessness, its shrunkenness, will become manifest.

So the question is, Is there a remedy for this sickness? Is there a divine pharmaceutical? Can we be saved from it? And the answer, of course, is yes, there is. There is restoration and healing and transformation for souls curved in on themselves, and it’s available to us in Jesus Christ. His lordship over our lives, our submission to Him as our Savior, begins the marvelous reshaping of our souls. That’s why the Son of God came from heaven.

The remedy for the bent soul shape is found in the way the Lord Jesus came into this world that we have distorted, lived a life of perfect soul shape, and then took the judgment of God against all our sinful distortions, and then by His grace gives us not only forgiveness but the beginnings of new life. And as He calls us to trust Him, He gives us the ability to repent, which really means the beginning of the turning back again from the old sinful way, the turning outwards to the Lord, the reshaping of our souls in the likeness of the Lord Jesus, who is Himself the image of God.

I think it’s very significant that Martin Luther, who spoke about this basic problem of having a bent soul shape as being incurvatus in se, also wrote in the very first of his famous Ninety-Five Theses, “When our Lord Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ He meant that the whole of the Christian life should be repentance.” Yes, the whole Christian life is a process of souls that have been sinfully bent out of shape being bent back by grace into shape. That can be a painful process, but it’s gloriously worth it. This is a word for us all, isn’t it, because this soul shape distortion has affected every single one of us. Thank God Jesus can bend us back.