It is “His kindness that leads to repentance,” which is to say it is in His kindness toward us that we find the capacity to become something different. God knows that love, not judgment, is the key to personal transformation. When we experience this kindness from God, especially in those parts of our lives we consider shameful or unworthy, we call it Grace. Yet there is this strange disconnect between the grace we long to receive from God, and what we decide is the best way to treat ourselves. We do not typically extend God’s divine kindness toward ourselves, choosing instead to let Shame drive us to reject and hate the darker or more conflicted places within us. We think, mistakenly, that doing this will produce change.
Love, not judgment, is the key to personal transformation.
But this is not the way God deals with us at all. Rather, His Spirit comes to love us at the very point of our deepest self-rejection. The thing in us we think cannot be loved is the very thing He loves the most, and through loving it, restores it to life.
The discipline of God is a discipline fueled by love. He loves us too much to leave parts of us shattered or half-formed, shadowed in darkness. The first step to restoring anything to its original glory, after all, is to love it. This is what God does with us, and this is what all good discipline does as well. You cannot change any part of yourself until, first, you love it.
Conversely, any discipline fueled by shame cannot produce freedom. It leads only to a soul divided, at war with itself, continually bound in a struggle that can never be won.
What has typically fueled your attempts at self-discipline—self-hatred or self-love?
