Finding Our Authentic Self

“The entirety of Your Word is truth.”  Psalm 119:160

There is a lot of talk these days about authenticity and being our authentic selves.  Our society is becoming convinced that authenticity produces happiness . . . and who doesn’t want to be happy?  Who wouldn’t do anything to be happy all the time?  Carley Hauck, a life coach, writes:

“Did you know that authenticity is inextricably linked to happiness? To be authentic is to feel at home in your body, accepted into a particular group, and to feel true to our sense of values. It is a kind of confidence that doesn’t come from attaining something outside of ourselves, but knowing deeply we are enough whatever our particular feelings, needs, or skills are and that we add to the greater whole of life and matter. We can be true to our own personality, spirit, or character despite external pressures.”  (https://www.mindful.org/4-questions-foster-authentic-self/)

Believing that knowing who you are will bring happiness or fulfillment isn’t a new thing.  In the 1960s and 70s (when I was growing up), the stock phrase was “finding yourself.”  This was actually part of the original hippie movement; the desire to find happiness through the unfettered ability to do whatever your feelings dictated.  Even Shakespeare (in Hamlet) wrote: “This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man” (Act 1, scene 3, 78-80).  So as you can see, “be your authentic self” is simply a rehash of an old, very old concept.

What is the core meaning within “authentic self?”  What actually does Hauck (or anyone else) mean when they say “knowing deeply we are enough?” Is it even possible to achieve what Hauck outlined above?

Hauck states three characteristics of authenticity: (1) feel at home in your body; (2) be accepted into a particular group, and (3) feel true to our sense of values.  All three of these deal with feelings.  “Knowing deeply we are enough” is a feeling, because even if someone else told us that we are enough, we likely wouldn’t believe them because we wouldn’t feel enough.

We didn’t always rely on feelings to determine the truth of our existence.  Prior to the Baby Boomer generation, America, for the most part, embraced values outside of one’s own experience.  External values established on biblical principles.  (One could debate for days the rightness or wrongness of actually doing this, trying to live by biblical principles if one isn’t actually a believer, but that’s a discussion for another time.)  The societal changes in the 1960s turned America to look in another direction for a value system and we chose to look within ourselves, to use our feelings to judge whether or not something was good or profitable.  Out of this paradigm shift came the belief in “authentic self.”

Scripture doesn’t talk about the need to find one’s self.  In fact, the word “authentic” as we might define it here, isn’t found in scripture.  Rather, the Bible simply defines us!  God knew that we would live in deception, would allow our feelings to lead us into deception.  And so He, in His love, provided the definition of who we are so that we would know why we were created and what our purpose in this creation is. \We don’t need to seek out our “authentic self.”  Our Creator, Who knows us better than we know ourselves, has already taken care of that in His Word.

Every good thing in creation has its beginning and its foundation in one thing: the character of God.  When we talk about righteousness and sin, we are actually comparing what is God and what isn’t God.  So when we look at truth (or authenticity), it isn’t a feeling nor is it an abstract idea.  Truth is actually God, His nature, His character.  When the psalmist wrote “The entirety of Your Word is truth,” what he was writing is that as God reveals Himself through His Word, He is revealing truth: truth about Himself, truth about creation, and truth about us.

Because there are so many definitions of “truth,” we need to understand the Biblical definition.  Often we see truth as that which is correct.  But the Bible is more concerned about that which is genuine (as compared to that which is false).  It’s a correlation between righteousness and sin.  Righteousness is God’s character, who and what God is.  Sin is everything He’s not.  It’s the same with genuineness and falsehood.  God is genuine; everything else is false. 

Because we were created in God’s image, it is possible for people to actually be genuine, to be authentic.  But because sin affected who we were (and we are all sinners), we can now only become genuine in submission to God’s Holy Spirit through the process of salvation.  We find our authentic self when we surrender to God’s will and trust Him to mold us into the person He created us to be.  We don’t have to spend time trying to “find ourselves;” we need only look to God to see what His plan is for our life.  Our feelings are irrelevant; they will follow along if we determine in our hearts to submit to God’s will. 

We have no need to seek after authenticity in our lives.  We already have the means to live authentically when we trust the Lord Jesus to guide us into His truth.

©2017 Robin L. O’Hare.  All Rights Reserved.  Permission is given to Christian ministries to use this study free of charge with the following provisions: (1) used in its entirety including this notice; and (2) used unchanged, unedited, untruncated.  For all other uses, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com