“Find yourself” is common advice. But in the end, people who follow it find only ugliness, brokenness, and unhappiness. They pursue dreams, and find nightmares.

I don’t need to find myself. I do need to go to God’s Word. It will act as a mirror to show me my true reflection, one very different than what I would like to see. Scripture tells me that I’m a sinner, and that sin brings death. Sin, the original killer of happiness, is not my solution; it’s my problem. Eden was paradise, but sin ended paradise. What it didn’t destroy was the deep-seated awareness that we were made for the happiness only God can give.

The sinful self is destined to be an unhappy self. The miserable man searching for happiness needs to see his true condition—he is a sinful man desperate to be transformed. The quest to be himself is a false quest. He is himself already, and that’s his most fundamental problem.

You cannot find yourself in sin. Or rather, the self you find is not the self you truly want to be. Misery can actually be a kindness to us if it shows us our true condition while by God’s grace, we can still do something about it.

People often say, “I’m tired of living up to other people’s expectations. I need to be who I am.” Ironically, who I am is not the solution; it’s the problem. When you are a sinner, “Be true to yourself” is bad advice. (Those who speak to inmates in prison do not proclaim, “Be yourself”! What they need is to become someone different.)

You are yourself already. How’s that been working for you? Allie Beth Stuckey puts it this way: “If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can't also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment.”

Finding myself is not the solution. Only losing myself in finding Christ is the solution. The good news is that God came into the world to save you from yourself and transform you into a new person.

C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:

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.

…It is no good trying to “be myself” without Him. 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...

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. …Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.