I know I am running the risk of being dismissed by some for just another one of pastor’s rants about culture, the church, and Christians, but this is a pressingly central plague looming over us.  Our rampant individualism clouds our ability to see and understand the most basic truth of the Gospel.  This is summed up well in David Well’s book, Turning to God.  Here is a series of strung together quotations identifying the problem and insisting on the Biblical solution to our “rampant religious narcissism”:

 We need to begin by observing, then, that the gospel is not first and foremost about ourselves.  It is not a device for getting what we want or need.  It is not a technique for self-improvement or self-accomplishment.  It is not a means of tapping our own inner resources.  It does not offer itself as a tool for thinking positively about ourselves.  It is not about ourselves at all, although we are invited to believe its message.  It is about Christ.  It is about the actions of the triune God as he reaches out to sinners who can neither save themselves nor bow before him in submission apart from the working of his grace (Rom. 8:6-8).

(God) acted decisively in the person of the Son, whose coming and death was predicated by the Scriptures, were witnessed to and interpreted by the apostles, but derisively rejected by the Jews who crucified their Messiah.  In him, at the cross, God has dealt with sin finally and in a way that no mere human being could do.  As God he has taken triumphant action through the Son against all that has marred and broken his world.  The work completed, Christ rose from the dead and from him will issue the final judgment to which all will be summoned.  What a gospel!  And how small, by comparison, is the gospel we often hear today.  The contemporary message is circumscribed by inner experience and expects, as a matter of course, that the God of this universe will be pleased, if not privileged, to be able to meet the sinner on his or her own terms!  God, it seems, has value to the sinner, is interesting to the sinner, only insofar as he has something to give that the sinner wants–and that is peace and contentment!  How strange it is that salvation should even appear as the accommodation of God to the sinner when it can be nothing other than the grateful acceptance by the sinner of our great God’s kingship and provision of forgiveness.

When the cross is clearly in view so, too, is the truth that only God can save us; when personal experience is dominant then the truth that only God can save is not.  Then the gospel becomes human-centered and in the process the certainty of salvation and the joy of believing evaporate, for neither can be sustained simply by the vagaries of our internal experience.  And the majesty, the grace, the breathtaking wonder of what God did in and through his Son is lost.  What remains is simply a sinner who was clever enough to get what he or she wanted from God.

God does not exist for us; we exist for God.  Salvation is not something we do to get to God;  salvation is something God does to get us to himself.  We are not the center of all reality; God is the center of all reality.

When we are displaced as the almighty “I” of our world (and of the world in general) by the Almighty Living God, rather than experiencing the often anticipated emptiness and isolation, in fact we encounter the embrace and joy of His eternal presence.  Or as John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” (John 3:30)