We live in a culture preoccupied with the idea of individuality, the desire to "be yourself," and to your "own self be true." We grow up with it, it's what our teachers tell us, and what our educational entertainment promotes. It's one of the many things that makes turning to Christ wholeheartedly so difficult in this day and age, because we know in order to do so, we have to give up our goals, dreams, desires, all the way to our innermost selves, which is the opposite of the knowledge we have been ingrained with.
Gal 5:1 says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free…." How can we be free if we have to give everything up? How can express our individuality when we are just a "little Christ?"
Consider an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can never really make up your mind what you want, so you sample a little of this and a little of that. Only a small part of what you eat you actually enjoy, and you end up making yourself sick by over-indulgence. Life without God is just that…a infinitely large, greasy all-you-can-eat buffet. Sure, you have choices, lots of them, but they are all bad, and you don't feel very good at the end of it.
In 'Mere Christianity,' C.S. Lewis writes, "It is no good trying to 'be myself' without Him [God]. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call 'My wishes' become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils…Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained."
The reality is, life without God has many "choices" but no freedom, and we cannot give ourselves to Christ without giving up our "self." With the first, we are in the world, and with the second we are lukewarm, at best, and we all know what Christ said about that.
The only way to live free is to give our life to Jesus. He gives it back to us, squeaky clean and with a purpose. That is where our freedom comes, with direction and purpose, with something to live for besides ourselves. This is where our true personality develops, instead of one shaped by our conditions and circumstances.
"The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become." -C.S. Lewis
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