Is "You Do You" Harmful or Helpful?

Now, it's nice to know that mister Ruttlebond has a healthy amount of self esteem, but it's interesting what the court said in response to his request. This is what they said to him, and I quote, mister Ruttlebond is at liberty to feel twenty years younger than his real age and to act accordingly, the judges said. But changing his legal documents would have undesirable legal and societal implications. See, one of his arguments was, well, these days, people can change their gender, they can change their name, why can't I change my age legally? And notice something very important that they said there.

They didn't say you're wrong. They said, you do you. If you feel like you're 49, that's fine, but we just think it's gonna be too legally complex for us to change that legally. You do you. In the West, in places like The Netherlands and in Australia, we live in you do you cultures.

We live by mantras like you do you. Be true to yourself. Follow your heart. Don't live a lie. Be real.

We are surrounded by a culture that believes these things. We live in a culture that says, ultimately, you are the ultimate authority in your life. Finding the real you and living as the authentic you is the key to happiness. And this kind of thinking, as I talk about it in the sermon today, I'm gonna call it you do you culture. If you wanna talk about it philosophically, the actual philosophy is called expressive individualism.

It's this idea that you must look deep inside to discover who you truly are, define yourself, and then express that true self to find full and true happiness. And the influence of this philosophy is everywhere. In Australia, we hardly even realise that this is how we think. It's even in our children's movies. The Frozen franchise has made around $14,000,000,000 for Disney.

I think my household's given at least a billion to that with my youngest daughter, Rose, maybe. I don't know. But there's a song in the first movie which went viral. It's called Let It Go. I could sing it for you because our daughter sings it far too often, but I won't put you through that.

This song alone was one of the most successful songs the year that it was released. It reached number five in The US Billboard Hot 100, number 16 in the ARIA charts in Australia. Queen Elsa in the song, she sings about how she discovers freedom by unshackling herself from the expectations of others, the external stuff, and looking inside being her true self. That's how she found freedom and joy according to the song. This is what you do you culture teaches us all the time.

In the song, Elsa did the real her, and apparently, it felt amazing. You do you is just assumed by Aussies. Most of us don't even realise that we think this way. And assumptions like that are very powerful because they lie beneath the surface, unquestioned, yet shaping how we live. And so what we wanna do today is we wanna bring that assumption out from under the surface, and with bibles open, we wanna ask, is you do you harmful or helpful?

Is this kind of thinking, what we call expressive individualism, is it hurting us or is it helping us? Our movies, our media, our songs powerfully communicate this you do you message. But is it true? Is it good? Is it biblical for us as followers of Jesus?

The one of the other reasons it's helpful, and I've chosen to speak on this topic today, is because, as you know, we're in a season of rebuilding as a church. And church council, we've been working hard on a vision for ministry that we're gonna present to you for feedback very soon. And what we've been doing is we've been applying the unchanging gospel and our historic creeds and confessions to this cultural moment. And this cultural moment is absolutely saturated with what we call expressive individualism, or you do you culture. And so I think to be doing effective ministry here in the Gold Coast, we need to think hard about how the gospel challenges our culture, how it invites people to something better, because not only are we trying to reach people from this culture, but we ourselves live in this culture.

We ourselves are swimming in it and hearing its messages and hearing its advertisements, and we ourselves need to mature as disciples in a culture where we may even hardly notice that this message is everywhere. So it's helpful for us to bring this to the surface and to think about it biblically as followers of Jesus. Now before we dig in, let me just acknowledge that sometimes people say you do you. It's a lovely thing to say to someone sometimes. Like, if I'm going to a coffee shop and I order a flat white, my friend's like, I want a half strength skinny latte, please.

I might instead of saying, it's not real coffee, mate. I could say, you do you. You know, that's fine. You like your coffee like that? That's fine.

When it comes to personal preferences, sometimes we use it in a nice way. But when I'm talking about you do you culture today, I'm talking about expressive individualism. I'm talking about this idea that the culture feeds us that ultimately you doing you is where you'll find ultimate happiness. You discover yourself and define yourself, and when you live your truth, you will find happiness. That's what I'm talking about.

And we're going to explore how this kind of thinking affects our sense of meaning, our connection with others, and our happiness. Those are the three questions we're gonna be looking at as we try to unpack this topic today. So first, how does it affect our sense of meaning? That's the first question. How does it affect meaning?

U2U culture says you create your own meaning. I think it's a secular institute, the Berkeley Well-being Institute in America. They're dedicated to looking for scientific answers to well-being, and they define the full life as one that involves finding meaning or purpose, interestingly. That was their ultimate measure for a fulfilled life, one that is full of meaning and purpose. But you do you culture actually undercuts this because it says you create your own meaning.

But that's a really fragile way to discover meaning. Think about it. If I think about my own life, when I was 10 years old, based on my desires and who I was, my meaning in life would have been to play Nintendo 64. When I was 15 years old, my meaning in life might have been finding a girlfriend. When I was 32 years old, sorry.

I am 32 years old. About to turn 33, FYI. But it might be filling my home with children. When I'm 52 years old, it'll be getting them out of the house. Amen?

But which me is the real me through all these stages of life? My desires constantly change. It's such a fragile way to define yourself and to discover what you really want, to base it on what I feel like today and what I want today. UDU culture actually undercuts our well-being, even though it promises to give us it, because it can't give us a sturdy sense of purpose and meaning. Besides, even if we decided to define ourselves today, we don't actually know ourselves very well.

Don't listen to the lie that you know yourself better than anyone else. You don't. In fact, our obsession with ourselves in the West actually seems to have put us more out of touch with ourselves. For example, Matt Fuller, a British pastor and author in a helpful book called Be True to Yourself, writes this. He says, in the West, there exists the well documented better than average syndrome.

98% of The UK population think they have an above average IQ. 95% of the population think that they have above average looks. 98% think that they're in the top 50% of the nicest people in The UK. Now, risk of pricking the bubble, Matt says, I must tell you that the stats suggest half of us are less intelligent, uglier, and nastier than we realise. Ouch.

Although most of us will think that half doesn't include us. It's actually a well documented thing that goes on in Western culture. We seem to be less in touch with ourselves the more we try to look inside ourselves. How can we define our purpose and what will make us happy if we don't even know ourselves accurately? We do not discover our meaning and purpose by looking within.

But do you know what the incredible message of the Bible is? You are not self made. The Gold Coast needs to hear that. You were made by someone else. We open up with this verse at the start of our service today.

Psalm 100, it says, know that the Lord, He is God. It is He who made us, and we are His. We are His people and the sheep of His pasture. Or Psalm 139, which says, You knitted me together in my mother's womb. Such a delicate image that king David uses there.

And if you've ever knitted before, it's a slow process, isn't it? It's a very intricate and delicate design that God has given to us. You are not an accident. It is not for you to dig up and discover your purpose. You were made by God.

God created you with great care and attention to detail. He is the one who has designed you in love. You know, if you wanna find the purpose of something, you generally take it to its manufacturer. I've got an iPhone, so if I've got a problem with my iPhone, I take it to the people who made it. I take it to the Apple store.

If you want to really understand how you work, you need to take yourself to the manufacturer. You need to take yourself to the creator. You need to take yourself to God and let Him tell you who you are, how you are made, how you work. If you wanna know your purpose and meaning in life, then you need to take those questions to God, your creator. UDoU culture cannot give a solid sense of purpose and meaning, but God does.

He is the one who defines it. And according to the Berkeley Well-being Institute, a full life is one that involves finding meaning or purpose. One of the other things that fosters well-being is relational connection. We've been made by a relational God. See that God was not a solitary individual for all eternity, but He is Father, Son, and Spirit, who has dwelt in this loving triune community for all eternity and made us in His relational image.

But it's not just because the Bible says we're relational. Even science confirms this as well. Jonathan Hite, a highly respected social psychologist, says having loving, committed relationships actually strengthens the immune system, extends life more than does quitting smoking, speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. We need to interact and intertwine with others. We need the give and the take.

We need to belong, he says. So if deep relational connection is so influential in our well-being, I guess we should ask, how does U2U culture affect this? Because U2U culture, this way of thinking, it's actually a modern innovation. It's a very new way of thinking about personhood in our day and age. And by the way, if you want to understand more about expressive individualism as a concept, how on earth we got here, and how the Bible speaks into it, I recommend this book to you, Strange New World by Carl Truman.

He is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in The US. Fantastic book. Takes you into the history and philosophy of how we've arrived in this cultural moment. Anyway, we're bringing this up to the service, and our second question is, how does this thinking affect our relational connections? That's the second question.

How does you do you culture affect connection? Because the you do you mindset says, be yourself, not what others want you to be. Don't look to others. Don't look to God. Don't look to anything external to tell you who you are.

Find yourself and express yourself, other people should affirm that. And it's not hard to see how that affects our relationships with others. First, if everyone believes in ultimate individual freedom, then no one has freedom because everyone else's freedom is a potential threat to my own. It can make others into enemies. People no longer become, you know, possible friends.

They become people who are taking away my freedoms. So that person that's taking the waves at the beach from me, they become an enemy. Or that other person who got the promotion that you wanted, you hate them. Or that person that got the parking spot that you were praying for at Pacific Fair. You know, God knows it's difficult to find a parking spot at Pacific Fair.

They've become someone that you get annoyed with. U2U culture does not help us deepen our connection with others. Instead, it teaches you that you are more important than others. Jonathan Hart, again, that social psychologist, he's not a Christian. This is what he says.

He says, an ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfilment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfilment. Now the Bible speaks into this very clearly. Philippians 2:3 says, do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. And Paul says that based on Jesus, he goes on to saying in Philippians 2 that we are to have the mindset of Christ, the attitude of Jesus, who though He had equality with God, chose to become a slave, a servant of us by taking on a human form, dying on the cross for our sins. Jesus is the ultimate example of this kind of living.

He died in our place for us. He considered us more significant than His own comforts. You do you culture tells you to be true to your feelings, to express yourself no matter what others think or how it affects them, but it's a dangerous mindset. It threatens the very joy and fulfilment that you do you culture promises. It threatens to destroy the relational connections that God designed us for and that our biology confirms is good for us.

You do you culture is harmful for connection, but the way of Jesus deepens connection. So Jesus teaches us to consider each other more significant than ourselves. I also love other practices that Jesus teaches us. I think about in the letter of James, where it says, confess your sins to one another. For me, those have been some of the most deeply intimate times with other Christians when I've just confessed my sinfulness to them, and they have reminded me of the gospel, reminded me of God's grace, reminded me I'm forgiven and prayed for me.

In 1 John 1, it talks all about the Greek word koinonia, which means fellowship, participation, sharing. You see that word coming up again and again and again, and there, it's about walking in the light in 1 John 1. It's about confessing your sins in order that, so in 1 John 1:9, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Confession of sin isn't just something private and secretly we do with God. It's actually something we can do with one another.

Someone that you know is a gospel hearted, mature Christian and saying, hey, I want to confess my sin to you. Can you keep me accountable? Can you pray for me? Can you walk for me? Man, I've had some deep connections built by doing that, by being vulnerable, by sharing and receiving their love and their help.

The way of Jesus actually fosters relational connection, actually builds it, rather than you do you culture, which actually harms it. So we've looked at how you do you culture affects our sense of meaning and our connection with others, but what about our overall happiness? Let's put it under that grid now. How does you do you culture affect happiness overall? Because the you do you way says the way to find happiness is to define yourself and express your real self.

You'll be like Queen Elsa from the movie Frozen when she sang, let it go. She felt so good. You'll feel free and unchained and so happy when you can just be yourself. But to be fair to the movie, the movie itself actually goes on to reveal the unintended consequences of her actions. As Elsa puts herself first, her relationship with her sister Anna becomes strained.

Elsa's isolation and self focus come at the cost of the love and connection she shares with her sister. You do you culture will not bring you the happiness you're looking for. And research shows that our obsession with ourselves in the West is making us less happy. Matt Fuller, again, his helpful book, he says, in her book, iGen, psychologist Jean Twenge analyses vast amounts of data and concludes that this generation is suffering the worst mental health crisis in decades. One in eight people under the age of 19 have a mental health disorder.

One in four of 17 to 19 year old girls suffer with a mental disorder, of whom half they said had self harmed or attempted suicide. The UK government is now introducing compulsory lessons for four year old children on how to handle depression. Now, there are complicated reasons for this phenomenon, but Twenge argues that a greater focus on the self is one key cause. This you do you thinking is not helping the West, it's not helping Gold Coasters find happiness, it's stealing our joy. But your manufacturer, your creator, knows you best.

He knows how you were designed, and this is why king David sung out in Psalm 16:11, You make known to me the path of life. In Your presence, there is fullness of joy, and at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Joy and life and fulfilment is found in walking with God and knowing God. But what does following God look like? Well, it looks like dying to yourself.

In our culture, that sounds crazy. That sounds harmful. Deny yourself, die to yourself. But that's what Jesus teaches in Matthew 16. It says in verse 24, then Jesus told His disciples, if anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.

Now if you're taking up a Roman cross on your back, where are you going? You're going to die. You're taking the thing you're gonna be hung on to die. Jesus is saying, take up your cross and follow Me. Die to yourself.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. You do you culture says, be true to yourself. Jesus says, deny yourself. You do you culture says you'll find life when you follow your heart, your desires. Jesus says you'll only find life when you give up your life for Me.

You do you says do what makes you happy. Earn money. Get the house. Travel. Leave the marriage if you need to.

But Jesus says, Matthew 16:26, for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? You do you culture assumes that there is nothing greater than you, but there is someone greater. Your soul belongs to Him. He designed you and created you.

And yet we have behaved like we are the masters of our own souls, like we are the captains of our own destinies. And this is what has brought humanity under God's judgement. The difficult truth we have to swallow is that without Jesus, we're all facing a death sentence. We're all under God's just judgement for rejecting His good and kind authority, and we can't do anything to change it. We can't be good enough.

We can't be moral enough to change it. The only hope we have is that someone outside of us does something radical. And this is what God did. God is the self giver who gave Himself over to our judgement and took our place in Jesus Christ. That's what the cross is all about.

God was in Christ, hanging there on the cross. Jesus is our place taker. Jesus denied Himself, took up our cross, and died in our place. And He's the one who secured eternal abundant life, but He did that through self denial. He died on the cross to serve the death sentence we deserve for rejecting and ignoring our creator.

And He is the one who said, whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. Jesus' life was extinguished at the cross for our sake, so that all those who deny themselves for His sake will be restored to connection with their creator, will recover the meaning of their existence to glorify God, and will discover the blessed happiness of life with God. If you give up control of your life and entrust it to Jesus, He promises to save your soul, and He promises you fullness of life, along with all the suffering of the Christian life as well. So if you're here this morning, or you're online and you're listening, and you're not a follower of Jesus, let me ask you, what's stopping you? Jesus has already taken the first step towards you.

He's already given up His life at the cross to save sinners. What's stopping you from giving yourself to Him today? He offers you real life, more than what our culture can't give you, but Jesus can. If you already are a follower of Jesus, what can you do to resist the influence of you do you culture? Because we're swimming in these cultural waters.

How can you make sure you're being formed by Jesus rather than the culture? And here's two things I suggest. Do the new you and deny the old you. See, if you're a believer, there are two yous. It's not that you have a split personality or something like that, but there are two yous in the Bible.

There's the old you. That's the you that's controlled by sin, which the Bible calls our flesh. Jesus put to death sin at the cross, but we live in this now but not yet tension in this time between His first and second coming where, yes, our sin has been dealt with, but it still has a little bit of ground in our hearts that Jesus is slowly driving out through His Spirit. And this old self, the sinful self, the flesh, it is self focused, it is fragile, it is scared of God and threatened by others. And then there's the new you, that's the you controlled by the Holy Spirit.

God has made you a new creation in 2 Corinthians 5, I think it is. The new you is others focused, steadfast, drawn to God, and compassionate toward others. So as a follower of Jesus, it's not you do you. It's do the new you and deny the old you. So how can you, first of all, do the new you?

God is renewing you and healing your human image that was originally broken by sin. Think Romans 8, where it says that He predestined us to be conformed to the image of His Son. Jesus is the perfect image of God who we are being conformed to. We're becoming more like Jesus over time. And through Jesus, He has given you an unbelievably glorious identity, better than you might have ever imagined, better than anything you could have self defined.

So let me encourage you to discover who God says you are in Christ, to learn more about that. Do you know who you are? The identity that God has gifted you is incredible. It's far better than anything you and I could conjure up in ourselves. You are in Christ.

That's Paul's favourite way of speaking about believers in the New Testament. He always talks about how we're in Christ. We're in Christ. We're in Christ. When we the doctrine or the teaching about that is called union with Christ.

When you put your faith in Jesus, God puts His Spirit in you, and He unites you to Jesus by the Spirit. You become one with Jesus. You're placed in Christ. You know how Jesus talks in John 15, how He is the vine and you are the branches, and that we're to abide in Him. You've been grafted into Him already, and then you continue to enjoy that fellowship with Him.

But because you are in Christ, you have an incredible identity. You are in the righteous one. Jesus' perfect spotless righteousness is yours. Because you are in Christ, you are in the beloved son of the Father. You could not be any more loved.

You are loved as much as Jesus is loved. Your identity in Christ is far better than anything you could self manufacture. And if you want to deepen your understanding of that, then can I commend this book to you, Union with Christ by Sinclair Ferguson? Now I confess, I haven't actually read this myself, but Sinclair Ferguson is a wonderful Bible teacher, and most of his ministry is about this doctrine actually. So let me encourage you to read that book if that's something you want to do.

Get to know who you are in Christ and do the new you. The other thing I wanna speak about to our young adults specifically is about a group that we're relaunching. We started a group a few months ago, and we decided one of the first things we do as young adults was go through this book called the Gospel Way Catechism by Treven Wax and Thomas West. Now, in our church, we have these beautiful historic confessions and catechisms like the Heidelberg Catechism, and we take our young people through that to teach them about biblical faith. But the thing about our historic confessions is that they were written in a time when the dominant context was Roman Catholicism.

You think about where we're living today, is the dominant context Roman Catholicism? No. It's secular, expressive individualism. And so what this book attempts to do very helpfully, it uses that kind of catechism format, which is a question and answer format, and it helps us understand how the Bible applies to this culture. And so I think it's really helpful for young adults to be going through this.

And I've emailed some of you that were part of that group or interested in the group that we're gonna be meeting 10:45AM after the service in the back hall for a quick chat about when we can meet. If you wanna go through this book with us and you're a young adult, and you do you, you define that how you want, just a joke, then come in the back and we can chat about going through this book together. It's one of the first things we can do together. I think that'll be a really fruitful way about understanding how the gospel and biblical doctrine applies to our current cultural moment. So that's the first thing.

If we wanna resist this cultural tide, we need to do the new you, and the second thing we need to do is deny the old you. And there are so many things we can do every day to deny the old self, but we actually need to get used to denying our desires sometimes, especially the bad ones. And one spiritual practice I can commend to you, this is not very popular in evangelicalism these days, but it's the spiritual practice of fasting. Jesus talked about it in the sermon on the mount, he seemed to assume that his followers would still do this, because in the sermon on the mount, he said, when you fast, do it in this way. And it's something that helps us to learn the discipline of denying desires.

So something you could do is maybe a lunch break each week. And instead of eating lunch, and instead of taking the time to prepare the meal and microwave it and eat it, you spend that time in God's word and in prayer, and just telling God, I live by every word that comes from Your mouth alone. I live for You. You are my creator. And just spending time in His presence, enjoying Him in prayer instead of the time that you used to eat.

Now that's not gonna be for everyone, but that's one practice you might use to practice denying the old self or just denying desires, just learning how to do that. Hunger pains are not evil at all, but learning to deny desires is helpful for us in this culture. Do the new you, deny the old you. Let me finish by sharing a story with you that I heard from a pastor in Perth a few years ago. He told the story about this young woman in university.

She was in her twenties. She was attractive. She was smart. She had all the right opinions. She was loved by her peers.

She was accepted. And then all of a sudden, she became a Christian. And he was mind boggled by this because in the culture's eyes, she was, you know, at the top of the tree sort of thing, the top of the social ladder. And he was really interested in asking her, like, what was your experience? How does it feel now to be a Christian?

And let me quote to you what she said to him. She said, I feel free. I used to worry so much about how others thought about me. I used to worry so much about saying the right things all the time. I can finally be myself.

Isn't that interesting? In discipleship to Jesus, in denying herself, she actually found her true self because God is the one who defines us. Christ is the one who gives us a true identity. She actually felt she could be more honest and more real. It's incredible.

Jesus said, whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. Let me finish by taking you back to one of our historic catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism. It's a question and answer summary of the Christian faith. It's a beautiful, beautiful document, and it reminds us about why it's such a beautiful blessing, not to belong to ourselves, but to belong to God. In question number one of the catechism, it says, what is your only comfort in life and in death?

And here's the answer, that I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with His precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven. In fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to Him, Christ, by His Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for Him.

What a blessing it is to belong to our heavenly Father. Let's pray together. Father, thank You for adopting us as Your children. Thank You for Your great love. Thank You that we have discovered that it is actually not oppressive to belong to a higher authority, but that it is our heart's desire to belong to You.

We thank You for setting us apart in Your love from before the foundation of the world. We thank You for placing us in Christ, and we pray that we could live and walk in that reality each day. Help us, Jesus, as You command us to abide in the vine, to remain in You, to make our home in You. Help us to walk in prayer and in love. Help us to see through cultural lies so that we're not swept up in them.

And help us with compassion and love to hold out the gospel to the Gold Coast, to the world around us where so many people think that they're gonna find life in themselves, and we pray that many more might find life in Your Son, Jesus. It's in His name that we pray. Amen.