What Kind of Person Are You?

Do you know yourself?

Blaise Pascal once said, “There are two kinds of men, the righteous who believe themselves sinners: the rest, sinners, who believe themselves righteous.”

C.S. Lewis agreed. “When a man is getting better,” he once wrote, “he understands more and more clearly the evil that is left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he’s not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he’s all right.”

At the very core of Christianity is an understanding of our own inadequacy. I do not possess any strength or power – or even purpose – outside of Jesus Christ. I am entirely dependent upon Him to lift me up when I fall down, which I do on a daily basis.

Has it ever occurred to you that at the heart of almost every problem is the failure to recognize this fact of our faith? When we trust more in our strength and power than His, our priorities are inevitably reordered, and not for the better. In our brashness we wind up taking God’s seat, and declaring ourselves both judge and jury. Indeed, almost all human misery is derived from not knowing who we are – and in Whom we must place our trust and life.

“The meek man,” wrote A.W. Tozer, “is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life.”

And so again, I ask you: What kind of person are you?