Ten Commandments You Should Break

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter known for his beauty. He fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water and was so enamored that he wasted away there. Can we escape the captivating pond of our own admiration, or are we destined to become modern echoes of that timeless myth?

From Nero to Nietzsche, Rousseau to Foucault, history is littered with sad lives and tragic endings of those prophets and purveyors of self-worship. Thaddeus Williams wrote Don’t Follow Your Heart: Boldly Breaking the Ten Commandments of Self-Worship as a redemptive revolt against the spirit of our age. This is a manifesto that shows the Christian how to be countercultural in the current zeitgeist.

It’s a solid companion volume to secular treatments of our postmodern times like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Neal Gabler’s Life the Movie. This book reminds us that when we try to live as if we’re the center of the universe and can create our reality, reality tends to bite back hard.

Self-Worship as Religion

Most Christians affirm the power of the Bible’s Ten Commandments for pursuing holiness. But what if there were “Ten Commandments” of self-worship? They’d probably be things like #liveyourbestlife, #youdoyou, #yolo, and #loveislove. These are some of the chapter headings Biola professor Thaddeus Williams uses as he dismantles the hollow promises of a philosophy of self-deification.

When we try to live as if we can create our reality, reality tends to bite back hard.

Self-worship is a form of religion, according to Williams, complete with “prophets, millions of devotees, a thick hymnal, commandments, and underlying dogmas” (xvii). This isn’t merely a passing trend but a deeply ingrained ideology. It’s grounded in the Serpent’s promise (the oldest lie), and following yourself is to be on the wrong side of the future.

This form of self-worship offers promises of liberation, originality, adventure, and fulfilled dreams. However, these promises are nothing more than mirages, leading to emptiness and disillusionment. If man is the measure of all things (as Protagoras has said), then all is relative. And relativism comes to kill beauty, truth, love, and justice. Those who exalt man above all else are all failed assassins.

What J. P. Moreland calls the hunger for drama in a thin world is summarized by Williams as self-worship leading to a desiccated life. He talks of self-worship as “a giant steamroller that flattens all of life to one never-ending plateau—no peaks to climb, no valleys to brave, no jagged terrain to heave our tired selves over in pursuit of some high and noble goal” (93).

Reading Don’t Follow Your Heart brought to mind the self-worship mindset that has infiltrated churches in the modern West. Many Christians have embraced a watered-down gospel that caters to the self more than it challenges people to die to self and live for Christ. There’s a warning that when believers adopt values like expressive individualism, they lose their power to be salt and light.

Williams illustrates this in a homely anecdote about teaching his daughter to draw Mickey Mouse. When his tutorial went awry, resulting in “a razor-toothed demon spawn in unerasable thick black graphite,” his instructions met with a young child schooling him “in the dogmas of expressive individualism.” The 8-year-old quipped, “You have your way to draw Mickey, and I have mine. Neither is right or wrong, they’re just different” (144).

This teaching moment is humorous in a child, but too often our response to God’s truth reflects this sort of deviation from the Creator’s design. This should provoke serious self-reflection: Are we embracing cultural idols (a theology of glory) or clinging to Christ (a theology of the cross)?

Looking within ourselves doesn’t account for the cognitive distortions and sin patterns that warp our views and desires. Williams says our hearts are “divided, depraved, dithering, dull, and delusional” (52). In the 16th century, Martin Luther wrote, “Scripture describes man as so curved in upon himself that he uses not only physical but even spiritual goods for his own purposes and in all things seeks only himself.” He paints a picture of sin warping our beings until we’re the center. The only answer for that is the gospel.

Recovering from Self-Worship

If we abandon the self, what do we replace it with? Not surprisingly, Williams’s remedy is to replace self with something outside of and larger than yourself, something wondrous and awesome—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He writes, “You become most truly yourself, not merely in a state of awe, but in a state of awe for the ultimate Source of all that is awesome” (8).

That true authenticity is recognizing and walking in who we were made to be instead of the authenticity that’s often arrogance in disguise. It’s taking our Creator’s heart—as revealed in his Word—more seriously than our own. Meditating on what he says about us, and how Christ embodies our truest self, is a call to the kind of counterculture that Christians have always been known for.

Williams offers hope, reminding readers that change is possible through God’s grace. Prayer, Scripture meditation, and service are practical remedies for self-worship. Each chapter includes the testimonial of a “heretic” who has rebelled against self-worship, along with a suggested prayer and devotional exercises that encourage resistance to expressive individualism.

Prayer, Scripture meditation, and service are practical remedies for self-worship.

Don’t Follow Your Heart ends with an invitation to join an online community of individuals committed to subverting “the religious narcissism of our day” by living lives reflecting “awe for the God of the Bible,” “courage to champion the objectively beautiful, good, and true,” and “looking to God’s Word rather than within [themselves] for answers” (176). Readers could also cultivate these practices in their local church community.

Williams concludes with a nod to Westminster Catechism Q&A 1:

There is a theocentric (God-centered) shape to the universe. Within that structure, we are born teleological beings made by him and for him. Glorifying and enjoying him is how we become fulfilled human beings. (146)

There’s a chief purpose to our lives, and self-worship will never get us there.

With scholarly rigor and pastoral warmth, Williams has rendered the church a vital service. The hollow promise of self-deification only enslaves us to our fickle desires. But Williams charts a better path, one of freedom found in centering our lives on the loving God who created us and crafted our purpose. May this book deliver many from the burden of self-worship into the joyful adventure of a God-centered life.