Pastor's Corner: Self-awareness

The book of James tells us about an amusing scenario: a man who looks in the mirror, carefully considering his own face. But once that man steps away from the mirror, he promptly forgets what he looked like! All the scrutiny of his own features didn’t leave them in his memory (James 1:23–24).

In this little scenario, we can see a problem that is very widespread among human beings, that is, a lack of self-awareness. Robert Burns, in his poem “To a Louse,” wrote these lines:

Oh, would some Power the gift give us

To see ourselves as others see us!

His meaning is that we are often unaware of how we come across to others.

That’s not hard to illustrate. For instance, when you first hear a recording of your voice, a very common response is to say, “Do I really sound like that?” We are surprised that our self-image is not clearly right and obvious to everyone. We didn’t see ourselves clearly. Or, like the man with the mirror, we swiftly forgot our own appearance.

What James is talking about, however, is a little different. He’s concerned with someone who hears God’s word, who learns what is right to do, but doesn’t put it into practice. Why would James illustrate the concept of a forgetful hearer by a person who forgets what he looks like? (James 1:22–25)

The common point is self-deception. For James, if you only hear and don’t do, you are deceiving yourself. One big reason we don’t know how we come across or what we are like, is that we basically lie to ourselves about who and what we are.

And one of the biggest ways we do that is by minimizing the vast chasm between what we know and what we put into practice. We let ourselves think that we’re all right because we know what’s right, even though we don’t follow through in our behavior.

And maybe there’s a still deeper point: We don’t know ourselves at all clearly until we’ve learned by trying how bad we are at consistently doing what we know to be right.