The devil not always to blame ...

I don't usually find the articles in Christianity Today interesting to read, but this one is quite an exception.

Entitled "Self-Examination Time," the article reminds believers of the importance of self-knowledge in proper Christian living. Such self-knowledge, the writer says, will not be possible without the illumination of the Holy Spirit. Now this may not be as hard to construe as it may first sound. It simply means that such knowledge of self depends more on your spiritual condition than your own (presumed) intelligence or inward perceptiveness. This is quite an important distinction, because many people who believe they have a good understanding of themselves often end up doing things that unnecessarily complicate or tangle up their own lives, thus causing inconvenience and grief not only to themselves but most typically to others as well along the way. The writer of the article puts such folly neatly in perspective with a quote from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, where the master Devil advises his apprentice Wormwood on how to beguile the Christian under his care:

"You must bring [your patient] to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."

Certainly most of us can vouch for the existence of people like that -- blind to their own defects which are glaringly obvious to everybody else around them. However, I think rather than ignorance, the problems with these people are more often denial and rationalization. They either refuse to confront the reality of their defects, or they re-package them into something to be accepted, even welcomed. In short, they use God to rationalize their headstrong preference to serve their own desires rather than His.

That is why the article cautions that what usually makes us sin is not so much temptation from Satan as our own hearts. We all like to deceive ourselves in one way or another, and it is not as if we are not good at doing that. Therefore the writer is absolutely right in saying that no amount of self-examination is any good if it comes solely from ourselves; it must come through a spiritual awakening, an honest confrontation with our own personality the way a mature, sincere, and well-intentioned Christian friend would.