To Thine Own Self Be True

Read the session · 12 min

Where have you heard “to thine own self be true”? Who says it? What kind of person, in what kind of moment? Has anyone ever said it to you about a decision you were making? That moment matters, because the sentence can do more than one thing.

Before we touch this, I want to be clear about which version of it we're actually testing. Because this sentence does more than one job. If “be true to yourself” means tell the truth, stop performing, know your limits, say the hard thing out loud, or refuse to let somebody run your life for you, then there's real wisdom in it and we're not going after that. Some of you have used this sentence to get out of something you needed to get out of. I'm not touching that.

The problem starts at exactly one spot. It's when this is what I deeply feel becomes therefore this is what I ought to do. That's the move we're testing. Just that one.

Source

Shakespeare. Hamlet, act one, scene three. Who says it, and what we've done to it. Laertes is leaving for France. His father Polonius stops him at the door and delivers a farewell speech, and that speech is where we get the line.

Hamlet, act 1 scene 3

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Polonius is famously verbose, intrusive, and inconsistent. And one act later he hires a man named Reynaldo to follow Laertes to Paris and spy on him. At the end of the play he dies hiding behind a curtain, eavesdropping. That's his last act.

So there's an irony we lose every time we quote the line by itself. The man counseling his son to live with integrity is about to put a tail on him.

But the bigger issue for us isn't whether Shakespeare meant it sincerely. It's what we have made the line mean.

Instinct

Start with the line we don't quote. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

There's a therefore in there. Be true to yourself, and therefore you won't be false to anybody else. In Shakespeare's English, being true to yourself meant something closer to being sound, consistent, honest in your dealings. And if you're that, the logic goes, you can't cheat your neighbor.

Now notice which half survived. Nobody quotes the second line. It's on no coffee mug in America. I can't tell you why four hundred years of speakers dropped it. But I can show you the effect of dropping it. In our version, being true to yourself carries no guarantee about anyone else at all. We use this phrase to explain why we are going to be false to somebody. I have to be true to myself, so I'm leaving.

Where have you seen the problem this is trying to solve? The person who vanished into everyone else's expectations? Is there a version of this that's just true?

And the instinct underneath is real. It's protecting against hypocrisy. Against living a performance. Against becoming so shaped by what other people expect that you disappear. Church people are unusually prone to exactly that. There's a version of Christianity that produces a Sunday self and a Tuesday self and never lets the two meet. Scripture hates that. James calls the double-minded man unstable in all his ways, and then says it again in chapter four: purify your hearts, you double-minded.

So if this saying is protecting you from becoming a fake, hold onto that. We're not going after that part.

The Text

So where does it break? Two places, not one. The first is that it makes the self the final authority.

Two things in two verses, and most people only ever quote the first one. Verse 9 is the diagnosis. The heart is deceitful. Not just weak, not just prone to mistakes. Deceitful, which means it actively misleads you, and it's good at it. And then the question: who can understand it?

That's not rhetorical despair. It's a real question, and verse 10 answers it. I the LORD search the heart. God alone knows your heart perfectly. Notice I didn't say you know nothing about yourself. You know quite a lot. Scripture assumes you do. What it never says is that your knowledge of yourself is complete, or that your verdict on yourself is the last one.

And one thing this does not mean. It does not mean every desire inside a Christian is evil, or that Christ leaves you unchanged. The same prophet who wrote this wrote chapter 31, where God promises a covenant with his law written on the heart. Ezekiel promises a new heart outright. God really does renew people by his Spirit.

Paul tells us how that feels from the inside. Galatians 5: the flesh and the Spirit are at war in you, which is why you don't do the things you want to do. Renewed, genuinely. Not yet finished. So your inner life is real, and it matters, and it just never becomes an infallible source of truth.

Proverbs says it from the other side. Trust the LORD with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, be not wise in your own eyes. Scripture warns us repeatedly that our own judgment of ourselves is not a sufficient final standard.

And Paul says it about himself, which is the sharpest version of all.

When have you been most confident about your own motives and most wrong? Paul's words reach right into that experience. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. Paul has a clean conscience and he says a clean conscience is not a verdict. That's the whole lesson in one sentence, said by a man about himself.

Here's the second fracture. The saying doesn't just make the self the final authority. It makes the self the destination. The modern version assumes there's an authentic you buried somewhere inside, that your job is to find it and express it, and that the worst thing you can do is suppress it. Every movie you've ever seen has this plot.

Now listen to Jesus.

Now let me be careful, because this passage is about discipleship. It's about allegiance to Jesus and the cost of following him. It isn't a lecture on modern self-discovery, and I don't want to make it say something it isn't saying.

But look at the shape of it, because the shape speaks to us. Deny himself. Not improve himself. Not express himself. Deny. And then whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses it for Jesus' sake will save it.

The person who spends his life protecting and curating and defending himself ends up losing the thing he was protecting. The person who hands it over gets it back.

And notice Jesus is not asking for the destruction of personhood. Verse 25 is worried about a man who loses himself, and Jesus says that like it's a tragedy. He's after your self-rule, not your existence.

Paul gives us the positive side of that in Colossians. You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. And a verse later, Christ who is your life. Your life isn't something you have to manufacture out of your own interior. It's received.

So if your own verdict isn't final, and you can't manufacture yourself from the inside, what do you actually do? Are we just stuck? No. Psalm 139, and I want you to see the whole shape of it, not just the famous part.

David spends eighteen verses on how completely God knows him. Searched him. Knew his words before he spoke them. Saw him before he was born. And then verses 19 through 22 take a hard turn that almost nobody reads out loud in church.

That's in the Bible. That's in the same psalm as “fearfully and wonderfully made.” David is not managing his feelings here. He's not editing himself for church. He says the most violent thing he has to say, out loud, directly to God.

And then, in the very next breath, this.

Does it change anything for you that verses 19 to 22 are in the same prayer? David's next words matter because of what he has just said. Look at the order. He has just told God exactly what is inside him, in the strongest words he's got. And then he immediately asks God to examine him and see if there's anything in there that shouldn't be.

David is completely honest about what he feels. He doesn't pretend, doesn't spiritualize it, doesn't clean it up first. And he will not let it be the last word. He is willing to look at himself, and he knows he is not an impartial judge of himself, so he invites God into the examination. Search me. Know me. Try me. See what I can't see. And then lead me somewhere.

Who in your life is allowed to tell you something true about you that you can't see? David's prayer asks for that kind of honesty from God, and for more than a diagnosis.

Notice he doesn't stop at the diagnosis. Lead me in the way everlasting. He's not asking to be exposed. He's asking to be taken somewhere. One more, and then we'll put it together.

Quick note so nobody trips. When Paul says “the life I now live in the flesh,” he means his ordinary bodily life. It's not the same use of the word as Galatians 5, where the flesh is the thing at war with the Spirit. Same word, two jobs.

There's an I that got crucified and an I that's still living, and Paul puts them in one sentence without blinking. He still says me. Twice at the end: loved me, gave himself for me. He hasn't disappeared.

So Christianity does not erase the self. It puts the old self to death and renews the person in Christ. Paul is still Paul. He just no longer understands himself as a life that belongs only to him.

Breaking Point

Think of someone standing at a decision and saying they have to be true to themselves. Where does this sentence take that person if they follow it all the way down? Who does this sentence serve, and who pays for it?

Here's the test. Taken as an authority, this sentence has no brakes. It can tell you to be honest about who you are. It can also tell you to leave your wife, because you have to be true to yourself. It can justify nearly anything, because the only authority it recognizes is the thing you already want. It has no way to say that desire is not worth following, because the desire is the whole argument.

Every one of us has wanted something we should not have had. The saying cannot help you there. It can only hand you the keys.

Better Word

Where's the line between being honest about yourself and obeying yourself? What could you say, in ordinary words, to the person you were picturing? Here's mine. “Be honest about what you feel. Let Christ decide what you follow.”

Both halves matter. The first half is David in verses 19 through 22, and it's the part of this saying that was always worth keeping. The second half is where the authority actually sits.

One last thing. In the garden, the night before he died, Jesus prayed this: My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.

Gethsemane shows us that honesty about a desire is a different thing from obedience to a desire. Jesus does not pretend the cup is easy. He names his anguish in front of his Father and asks, out loud, for another way.

And that desire does not become his authority. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will. His sinless human will recoils from the cross, and he willingly goes anyway, because that is who he is: the Son who came to do his Father's will.

So notice what Christianity is actually asking of you. It does not ask you to lie about what you want. Jesus didn't. It asks you to bring what you want before the Father and let his will decide what you do.

Think of one person who might need to hear that sentence sometime this week. It may be you.