THEARTOFCHRIST — Issue 10: Self-Awareness
Known Before Knowing
How Christ brings about life, and how He supplies it more abundantly.

The world sells self-awareness as mastery. Know your strengths and your weaknesses. Know your triggers, your patterns, your habits. Know how you come across to others. Study yourself the way a scholar studies a text. The promise is always the same: the man who knows himself will rule himself.

The herald announces a reversal. The man does not know himself. The man is known. And only the known man truly knows.

Self-awareness does not begin with the man looking at himself. It begins with God looking at the man — and the man, held in that gaze, learning to see.

Anchor: The Known Man

"But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God" (Gal 4:9, paraphrase).

Paul corrects himself mid-sentence. "Or rather." The greater truth swallows the lesser. Coming to know God is real. Being known by God is greater. The order stands, and the order is the whole lesson: first known, then knowing.

"If anyone loves God, he is known by Him" (1 Cor 8:3, paraphrase). Love's reward is not that the man gains knowledge. It is that the man is known. Self-awareness in Christ is not the man's achievement. It is the man's condition — known by God — becoming the man's sight.

Here is the movement. Apart from Christ, the soul studies itself and calls the study wisdom. In Christ, the soul is known by God and calls the knowing sight.

Apart from Christ, self-awareness is the self examining the self — and the examiner and the evidence are the same man. "There is a way which seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death" (Prov 14:12, paraphrase). The self-report is filed by a compromised witness. The man who inventories his strengths and calls it honesty keeps a ledger of pride. The man who inventories his weaknesses and calls it honesty keeps a ledger of despair. Both ledgers are kept by the same hand, and both are wrong about the man.

And the study itself becomes the worship. "For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools" (Rom 1:21-22, paraphrase). Self-awareness without God becomes the reverent study of the wrong object. The man learns everything about himself and nothing of God, and calls the learning wisdom. The end is not mastery. The end is folly. Man alienated from the life of God (Eph 4:18) cannot know himself truly, because the self apart from its Maker is a riddle the self cannot solve.

Even Scripture's own command of self-examination carries a fixed object. "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!" (2 Cor 13:5, paraphrase). The examination is commanded — but the question is not "do I know myself." The question is "am I in the faith." The exam has one question, and the answer is a Person.

In Christ, self-awareness is turned right around. The man does not climb inward to find himself. He is found — and in being found, he sees.

"Put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth" (Eph 4:24, paraphrase). The true self is not the old inventory of strengths and weaknesses. The true self is the new man, created in God's likeness. And the new man comes with its own knowledge: "the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the One who created him" (Col 3:10, paraphrase). True knowledge — real self-awareness — is renewal according to the image. The man knows himself truly only as he knows Christ, because the true self is Christ's image taking shape in him.

So the looking is not inward. It is upward. "But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory" (2 Cor 3:18, paraphrase). The mirror is not the self. The mirror is His glory. Beholding becomes becoming. The man who would know himself must look at Christ — and in looking, he is changed into what he sees.

"We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is" (1 John 3:2, paraphrase). Seeing is the engine of likeness. The final self-knowledge is not a deeper inventory. It is a clearer vision. The man sees Him — and becomes like Him. That is where self-awareness ends: not in the man knowing himself, but in the man resembling Christ.

Even the inner search is God's own work. "The spirit of man is the lamp of the LORD, searching all the innermost parts of his being" (Prov 20:27, paraphrase). The lamp is man's — but the searching is the LORD's. God gives the hearing. God gives the growth.

Self-Awareness Reaches the Body

Every topic in this workshop relates to physical life, and self-awareness is no exception.

The world's program sends the man inward to read his body like data. Track the hunger. Track the fatigue. Track the tension in the shoulders and the restlessness in the gut. Know your signals, optimize your inputs, master your outputs. The body becomes an instrument panel — and the man becomes its frantic pilot, reading gauges he cannot fully trust.

In Christ, the body is not a panel of gauges. It is a member of a body. "Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?" (1 Cor 6:15, paraphrase). The man does not own the body he studies. Christ owns it, and the body belongs to Him. Self-awareness of the body is not the pilot reading instruments. It is the steward receiving signals from an instrument that belongs to the Master.

The signals are real. Hunger speaks. Fatigue speaks. Pain speaks. But in Christ they are not commands from a master the man must obey, and they are not data the man must master. They are speech from a steward's trust. "In Him we live and move and exist" (Acts 17:28, paraphrase). Every heartbeat the man notices is a heartbeat sustained in Christ. The body the man is learning to read is being upheld, moment by moment, by the One who bought it.

So the question changes. It is no longer "what is my body telling me to do." It is "what is the Lord of this body showing me to steward." "Present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God" (Rom 12:1, paraphrase). The aware man presents. He does not merely observe the hunger — he offers the meal. He does not merely note the fatigue — he yields the rest. The body's signals become occasions of surrender, and surrender becomes worship.

Known before knowing. Beheld, then becoming. The man studies himself and finds folly. God knows the man, and the man — known, beholding, renewed — finds himself in Christ.