Making Sense of Self-Help & Spirituality
If you walk into a bookstore, you’ll find a wide variety of categories to pick from. Ever since I’ve been in college, I’ve gravitated to the same couple of sections: faith and what most people would call self-help, self-improvement, or personal development. As my blog has grown since 2019, my writing has generally stayed within those categories as well. In a sense, I’ve tried to converge the ideas of the Christian faith with strategies from the self-help field. While many would consider them opposite ends of the spectrum, I think there’s a lot to learn from both of them.
To be clear, I believe in following God and using his Word as the foundation of our life. While there is some truth to the cliché is that the Bible is a roadmap for life, it can be misleading. The purpose of the Bible is not simply to be a roadmap, because its foremost purpose is to be an authority that reveals Jesus Christ, that we might know, love, and glorify him. Yet as you read God’s Word, you would be remised to say that it does not give you principles and practices to live a better life. If you believe in a Biblical perspective, that God’s Word is our primary lens of seeing the world, then I believe there are elements of the self-help world that are tremendously useful. They are not opposite, just as long as like anything, self-help doesn’t become the idol on which you build your life. Self-help is not the answer, God is, but if we take strategies used in a secular field through a spiritual perspective, I believe our lives can be more effective. To leverage strategies of the secular world in a spiritual way is not heretical, it is wise.
The key is to always keep God at the forefront, to use him as the way you understand the rest of the world. Whether it’s self-help, science, history, politics, or nutrition, the information we consume should reflect a perspective rooted in the God who gave us all of those things. To quote C.S. Lewis, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
