How can I know myself?

'If I ever wanted to understand me, I’d have to talk to someone else.' So says Gnarls Barkley on 'Who Cares?' (I've just bought his album, 'St Elsewhere', which is actually not only good musically but pretty thought-provoking too, unless I'm reading too much into it!)

Most of us accept that sometimes other people close to us know us better than ourselves - our mums, or our best friends, or our husbands/wives. And in our society, when we really find ourselves in trouble we go and speak to someone else to understand ourselves - a therapist, a psychiatrist, a rehab clinic (just look at celebrities!) On shows like Desperate Housewives and Ally McBeal (if you're old enough to remember it!) therapists are a part of normal life, because they help people to understand themselves.

But ultimately, if you really want to understand you, you'd have to talk to the Someone Else who is your Maker, the God who created everyone in his own image (Genesis 1:26-27). No-one understands you like him, because no-one knows you like him - not even you.

That's why a very influential theologian from the 1500s, John Calvin (you have to say it with a French accent, as that's where he was from), begins his major work, his 'Institutes', with precisely that observation. Until you know God, he says, you cannot know yourself. Until you know what your Creator says of you, you won't be able to understand yourself.

On the album 'St Elsewhere', Gnarls Barkley turns to several different places to work out who he is, to understand himself - at no time does he turn to the God who made him. That's the tragedy of modern society; never have we spent so much money on working out who we are, on getting other people to tell us what we're like...when all the time, the One who made us is offering a free consultation in his word. If you want to know who you are, to understand yourself, pick up a Bible!

So why don't people do that? Maybe it's because we don't like the understanding of ourselves that the Bible gives us. We want to be told we're basically good people, not basically sinners who have rebelled against God; we want to be told we're heading in the right direction, not heading to hell; we want the option of finding someone else to give us a different answer, not find only a God who gives us total brutal truth.

'Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.' So continues 'Who Cares?'. We are all somebody, a somebody who is a sinner and needs saving, and can only understand that by understanding God; but nobody wants to be that somebody, so we run away from that truth by spending millions listening to others and ignoring God. The lesson? Listen to Calvin, and not to Barkley; 'If I ever wanted to understand me, I'd have to...listen to God.'