A sermon on self-care, self-centredness, and Christ-centred rest from Latimer Church
A solo sermon exploring whether the modern concept of self-care is compatible with biblical Christianity.
Summary
This is a sermon delivered at Latimer Church, most likely by James de Costobadie (Costa) or Tim Capill, working through the series titled (Un)Acceptable Sins. The episode addresses the modern concept of self-care — examining what is genuinely good about it, where it becomes dangerous, and why the Bible offers a better framework. The preacher argues that self-care, while containing some helpful recognitions about human limitation, lacks a biblical category and too easily slides into self-centredness, self-deception, and self-indulgence. The sermon proposes three correctives drawn from Matthew 11:28–30: that the best care is Christ-centred, Christ-shaped, and communal rather than individual.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Opening Scripture and Introduction
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."
That's Matthew 11:28–30. I don't know what comes to mind or how you feel when you hear that invitation from Jesus — it's a pretty well-known one. I don't know what you hear, but it sounds pretty good to me. We live in such a complex, convoluted, busy, and frantic modern world. Although there are things to be thankful for, so many things move at a mile a minute. And I know many people often feel tired, overwhelmed, anxious — and then you hear an invitation like that from Jesus, to come to him and he will give you rest.
Today we're thinking about the concept of self-care. If you haven't heard the term, it's become something of a modern buzzword, along with related terms of wellness and well-being. As I'm sure many of you do, when I heard the term I just thought it was simply about taking care of yourself in healthy and balanced ways, which seemed pretty good on the surface to me.
I was surprised — maybe I shouldn't have been — when I looked it up online, and you get all manner of comments about it. At one end of the scale, people online speak of self-care as a historically combative response against political and religious oppression, which started in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. On the other hand, some people speak of it as an incredibly clever global marketing scheme, with one estimate I looked at saying that the global wellness economy was worth upwards of five and a half trillion dollars a year — and that was just a few years ago.
Now I don't know how much of that is true. You can read anything on the internet. And in many ways I'm not fussed, because regardless of what's said out there, self-care itself has become such a prevalent ideal in modern Western culture that Christians need to think about this biblically — to bring God's word to bear so that we can think clearly, recognising what's good (and there is good), and avoiding what isn't.
What Is Good About Self-Care
I'm going to begin with a few general comments before landing in a more biblical framework for how to approach and think about these things.
First, the good. At its best, self-care recognises a few helpful truths.
One: we are limited. Of course, theories of self-care didn't come up with this fact. The Bible has been abundantly clear on this for thousands of years. It even calls us to delight in the fact that we have been designed with limits as human beings. It's one of the many good things that remind us — and it is a good thing — that we are not God and we depend on him for everything. You've been awake for a while, you need sleep. You're sick, you need to recover. We need food and drink, we need rest, we need time alone, we need many and various inputs to keep going. We can't do everything, and we can't keep going indefinitely. Knowing our limits is a good thing, not a bad thing. It inevitably shows us that God is God and we are not.
Two: we're all different. Although we are all equally created in God's image and equally valued, we each have our own unique gifts, strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, which God places on us for our good. These aren't always physical differences — sometimes they're mental or emotional. Some of us are introverts, some of us are extroverts. Everyone's unique. We have different strengths and needs.
Recognising these facts, modern self-care tells us that we need to be mindful of our individual limitations and differences and build in routines and practices of rest and exercise — activities that fill our cup as opposed to emptying it, as the language goes — so that we can maintain and sustain healthy living and avoid burning out or mental meltdown. All of these things sound good, and they are pretty good.
The Problem With the Self-Care Framework
But the question is, as Christians, is self-care the best way of describing or even attaining these things? We'll get to this in more detail later on, but the Bible itself tells us to implement patterns of rest. And doing what God says in the Bible isn't self-care — that's obedience. Terminology, maybe, but let me say something else.
The danger of speaking of self-care is that, as far as I can tell, there's no biblical category for it. We have calls for self-sacrifice, self-control, self-denial, self-emptying — but not self-care. And at the very least, as Christians, that should give us pause. It should lead us to think about why that is. Is it wrong, or are we just using the wrong terms? Is it just a matter of semantics?
Let me give you an example. I contend to be something of a people pleaser, which means I often keep saying yes to things until I'm fully booked, behind on most things, worrying about my performance — leading on occasion to tiredness, stress, and anxiety. Now you might say, under the umbrella of self-care, that I should learn to say no to some things over there so that I can find rest and balance to sustainably keep going over here. However, I want to ask: is that self-care, or is that self-discipline or self-control? Because they are biblical categories. They are God-ordained restraints for the sinful parts of our nature, acknowledging that we're not God, so that we can live to his glory and for the good of others, and operate as we were designed to.
Now maybe, as I say, it's just a matter of terminology. Maybe we don't have to think too much about these things. But I think it is helpful to think intentionally about them so that we can avoid the dangers and temptations which come with it.
Three Dangers: Self-Determinism, Self-Deception, Self-Indulgence
Because the central danger is that self-care so easily slips into being self-centred. If you start with self, the likelihood is you'll end with self. And this can show itself in at least three related ways.
It begins with a sort of self-determinism — the conviction that only I know what is best for myself. The Bible is very clear that ever since the Garden of Eden, we've desired the knowledge and authority of deciding what is right and best for ourselves. Remember, Eve saw that eating the fruit was useful for gaining wisdom and would make her like God, knowing — and therefore being able to judge — what is good and evil, right and wrong, best and worse for herself. The Bible is also very clear about how wrong she was. God knew best, and she didn't listen. And the Bible continues to show us that ultimately we don't know what the end results of our own judgment will be. Proverbs 14:12 says, "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death." Self-determinism is dangerous. Self-awareness is slightly different — self-determinism can be dangerous. Not all our judgments are good ones, and often a lot of them aren't very good ones.
Now a big part of the reason for that is a related danger: self-deception. Jeremiah 17:9 warns us that the heart is deceitful above all things, and it is beyond cure. We know there is a cure in the Lord Jesus, but that is an ultimate cure and it's one day still to come. The modern premise of self-care tells us that we have to decide what is best for ourselves, but can we ever truly trust our own judgment when we know our hearts to be deceitful? It's worth asking.
And it leads to a third danger, which is self-indulgence. Because we can never fully trust our hearts and minds to know the limits of what is helpful and what is sinful, the danger is that what looks like self-care actually becomes self-indulgence. Overwork swings to underwork. Busyness becomes laziness, that sort of thing.
Now, one of the difficulties in this area is that there's no strict set of guidelines for what this looks like for everyone. There's no Bible passage that you can go to that says this is what you do on Mondays and Tuesdays and Wednesdays. There's a wisdom and a flexibility needed for us to navigate this in a good and godly way. And if you know the Bible at all, you know it's going to radically upend many — or maybe all — of our natural inclinations. It's going to push us in ways that we know will be difficult. It will shift our priorities and patterns in ways we don't at first see as beneficial.
And if we're honest, I wonder if we worry that as we come to the Bible — knowing that it's going to ask of us some difficult things, that it's going to ask us to seek the glory of God and the good of others above ourselves — we're left with this fearful question: who's going to look after me?
God Cares for You Better Than You Can Care for Yourself
The world will tell you that in the end no one will look after you. You have to look out for yourself. But the Bible says something different. The world says no one knows you better than you know yourself. Well, the Bible says that not only does God know you better than you know yourself because he created you — he wants what is best for you more than you do. God wants more good for you than you want for yourself. It's an interesting concept, isn't it?
And actually, if you rely on self-care, you're receiving substandard treatment. Complaints to head office — which is still just you, if you get the drift. The infinite God who is love and the wellspring of all things loving loves you more than you can ever love yourself. And because he loves you, because he knows you, knows what's best for you and wants what's best for you, the best place to look for care isn't within yourself. It's to look to God — supremely in the person of his Son Jesus, and specifically in his word in the Bible.
Three Biblical Principles: Christ-Centred, Christ-Shaped, Communal
So we land right back where we began. Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."
Friends, there is much to be taken from these few words of our Lord Jesus — too much for one evening. But from these and a few other places, we need to see tonight — hopefully — three things from the Bible.
First, the best care is Christ-centred. Not self-centred — Christ-centred.
Secondly, the best care is Christ-shaped. I'll explain that when we get there.
And third, the best care is also communal, not individual.
What you get from this is: help doesn't come from within, help comes from without. And that's a wonderful blessing.
The Best Care Is Christ-Centred
Let's start with the first one. Jesus says, "Come to me and I will give you rest." Now yes, Jesus here is speaking finally of an ultimate rest — that is, a peace with God that will last for eternity, which only comes by faith in Jesus. If you've been a Christian for any degree of time, you understand that. It's trusting in his life and death and resurrection for an ultimate and future rest. But even saying that has an immediate effect, an immediate form of rest, which is a rest from thinking that our salvation depends on our own efforts. And all of a sudden that burden is lifted, because Jesus took that burden on us.