Episode 51: How to Stop Using the Gospel of Christ Against Yourself

Hello, podcast universe! I'm April Price and I want to welcome you to Episode 51 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. See that? I didn't let my brain win. It wanted to stop at 50 and here I am. I'd call that a victory. This is my life really. Just one victory over my brain at a time. It all counts and it's all creating something inside of me. And I love that.

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So how are you? How are you in your corner of the quarantined world? I hope you are hanging in there. In my weekly email this week I wrote about how this week I am choosing to think the thought that "this quarantine is amazing and exactly what I needed." And that is definitely changing how I show up in my world. I even smiled at David when he got home last night, so that's something.

So if you like that thought "this quarantine is amazing and exactly what I need," I encourage you to adopt it as well. Ask yourself how is this quarantine amazing for me? And just think about all the good things and what it is doing for you rather than taking away from you. Even for a day or even for a couple hours a day. It will make a difference.

And if you aren't getting my weekly email and my little Friday video that I've been sending out, you should sign up for that and you can do that at my website, aprilpricecoaching.com.

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So today, you guys, I wanted to talk about how we sometimes use the gospel of Jesus Christ, the gospel of love, against ourselves. And I personally did this for so many years and so many of my clients struggle with this as well. And even though I think the intention behind that is well-meaning, it is a painful way to live and it's a painful way to apply the gospel of love and hope, right?

So I want to have you step back for just a moment and understand what is happening here in the big picture. So we came to Earth, right? And here on earth many of us are told or we're taught about Christ and His gospel and his love and his message of hope and salvation that he offers to every single person on earth, right?

And this message is kind of the opposite of the instincts of our human brain. Our human brain always says that we should be scared and judgmental and that resources of love and approval are scarce. It says that we should be worried about rejection and we are all unworthy of love. Right? Our brains say there's never enough. We're gonna be left behind or left out or shut out or shamed. Right? Those are the natural instincts of our human brain.

And so as we learn the gospel, which is like the opposite of that, it passes through the filter of our very human brain. And because of our fear and because of our faults and because of our experiences and just our plain humanness, our interpretation of that pure gospel of love changes. And our thoughts about the Gospel and our view of the gospel of Christ often changes the gospel from something that was designed to bless us and help us to something that we start to use against ourselves. Something to hurt ourselves, something that we used to beat ourselves up with, something that we use against ourselves and others. We use it to build a case against people and against ourselves.

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But it isn't because the gospel is flawed and I want to offer it's not even because we have flaws. That's what I thought for so long. I thought that my flaws were keeping me from the love of the Gospel and the joy of the gospel. But the reason we use it against ourselves so much is because we have human brains designed to notice problems, designed to compare ourselves, designed to keep score, designed to worry about lack and scarcity and deficiency.

And it's our brains interpretation of the Gospel and our brains interpretation of us that prevents us from feeling the love of the Gospel and truly accessing the hope and joy that it contains.

And so today I want to talk about the most common ways I see our brain using the Gospel against ourselves so that we can be aware of this unhelpful interpretation and then purposely choose to think about the gospel and ourselves in a whole new way. (And let me just say that I know that this podcast goes to a wide audience and that some of you believe differently than me. But I think the concepts that I'm sharing apply to all of us that believe in Christ and want to incorporate his way of living and his way of loving more into our lives.)

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Okay, so the first way that we use the Gospel against ourselves is that we use the standard that Christ gave us, right, the model that he presented, that model of love and his standard of love, and we use that standard to prove that we are failing and that we are so far from that standard that we're never gonna make it. We're never gonna be like him and we're never going to be acceptable.

And so instead of producing awe in us for Christ—in the way that he was able to master himself love and love unconditionally and obey perfectly—instead of using that to inspire us and motivate us and show us what's possible and what we're working towards, we use it as an indictment of where we are and a final verdict on our capacity to change and become and love more like he did. We're like, "I'll never be there. So I guess I'm just the worst." Right? "I suck. I can't do it like that so I guess I'll just give up and hate myself," right?

He came to show us the way to show us what's possible, not to discourage us and condemn us and shame us for our efforts. Right. That was never his intention.

So I want you to think about this in terms of the Olympics. So I remember in the last summer games we were at home watching the gymnastics routines. Right? And I saw these guys doing the floor routine and these gymnasts they were like holding their bodies up off the floor just using their hands.

00:06:25:20 - 00:06:50:18
I want you to imagine they're like in that pike position, their toes are pointed, their legs are out, and their butts are off the floor. Right? Their legs are off the floor and they're holding themselves up with just their hands. And then they start twisting and swinging their legs between their hands and making figure eights in the air with their bodies, all while their feet and legs and their butt never hit the ground. They're just doing all of it while they're standing on their hands.

And I remember watching this with my family and thinking, "Huh. I wonder if I could do that." Right? I remember getting down on the floor and spreading my legs out and trying to lift my butt and legs off the ground at the same time. I was like, "Wait a minute. I can't even get up, let alone hold it for like one second, let alone twist my legs around and balance and all the things that they're doing." Right? "Like I can't even get my legs off the ground," right?

And suddenly you're watching this and you're like in total are of that kind of strength, that kind of power, that kind of control over their physical bodies. Right? Suddenly in that moment, you're fully aware of the magnitude of their talent and ability.

But when I watch the Olympics and I see one of those athletes and then try to do a floor routine in my living room, I don't disparage myself or hate myself or tell myself I'm hopeless or worthless or unworthy of love. I'm just in awe of the athlete and what he has created the capacity and strength that he has developed. And I know also, watching him, that if a human body can do that then, theoretically, given enough practice and enough work and enough training, enough muscles, then I could do it too, right? Theoretically. I haven't put in the work so I can't right now, but it is possible.

00:08:10:24 - 00:08:41:18
So often when we look at Christ and how he loves and what he can do, what he did, right, his capacity to love and forgive and obey and endure and overcome, instead of being in awe, we beat ourselves up for not being where he is. We make it mean terrible things about us as people, instead of what it does mean, which is we haven't put the work in that he has. Right? We aren't there yet. We haven't had enough practice and training. We don't know how and we haven't put in the work. And that's all.

He's showing us what's possible if we follow him and live like he did and train ourselves like he did. Our gap from the standard he set should be motivating instead of defeating. And how we do that is we recognize that our distance from the standard doesn't say anything about us fundamentally as individuals. It shows us where we have opportunity to grow and work. And if we see it that way we have the chance to become stronger.

And in fact, that is exactly what this life is all about. Not to be strong already, not to have that infinite capacity for love already, but to grow in our capacity to love.

So when your brain wants to say how bad you are failing, you can agree with it without making it mean something negative about you. Of course you fail. That's why you came. That's not a problem. Right? You are here to improve.

00:09:37:22 - 00:10:02:19
I like telling my brain, when it says I'm not a good disciple because I still can't do it like he did, I like to tell it, "I'm not here to do it right. I came to do it wrong as many times as I need to do it to get better at it. I'm here to get stronger." And that thought that I came to do it wrong as many times as necessary makes me feel compassionate with myself and it makes me motivated to keep working and keep trying.

Okay, so another way that we use the Gospel against ourselves that I think goes along with this idea that actually you're supposed to be doing it wrong is that we don't use the Earth life experience as a classroom where we came to learn. Instead we use it as like a sudden death final exam, like if you don't get it right it's all over. We don't allow for our own learning. We don't allow for mistakes in ourselves or others.

So I want to give you an example of this that I've been thinking about a lot lately. So in the Book of Mormon there's a prophet named Nephi who keeps a record of his people and God's dealings with him and his people, and he keeps this record on a set of gold plates. He engraved these plates and he keeps this record for a long time throughout his life.

And then God tells him to make another record. A condensed version of everything he's already written and put it on another set of plates. And Nephi says, "I don't know why I'm doing this. God just told me to do it. And so I am."

00:11:02:05 - 00:11:27:24
Okay, then much later in the book, a prophet named Mormon is editing and compiling all the records of all the prophets and he finds this set of plates that Nephi made, this extra set. And he writes in his record that God told him to include this set in his record and again he's like, "I don't know why I'm putting this in here." Right? It's redundant. "I already made a record but I'm going to put it in here anyway." He says, "I don't know why God told me to do this but I'm doing it."

Okay, so then we fast forward 1200 years or so. Right? When Joseph Smith is translating this record and he had a friend who was helping him do the translation who is like the scribe, who is writing the translation as he dictated. This man's name is Martin Harris. And Martin Harris wanted to show their work, these translated pages, to a professor. And so then Joseph went to God and asked "Can Martin take these pages to this professor?" And God said, "No."

And a little while later Martin Harris came back to Joseph and he's like, "Hey I really want to show these pages to someone." So Joseph goes back to God and says, "Hey can Martin take these pages?" And God says no again. Well, it happened a third time and the third time that Joseph asked God, "Can Martin take these pages?" God said, "Okay," Right?

And Joseph gives the pages to Martin, and that was the last time he ever saw them. Those pages disappeared or they were stolen or hidden or gone. Somebody took them or they disappeared. They were gone forever. And now Joseph had to go back to the Lord and tell him what had happened. Right, that he had messed up and that everything was lost.

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Now the end of the story is eventually after a long time of repentance the Lord gave him this other record that Nephi and Mormon and all these guys had prepared long ago. And what occurs to me in this story is that God knew all the time that this was going to happen, right? He knew Joseph was going to lose those pages. And so like 2000 years ahead of time he had Nephi and Mormon prepare for it.

And you think like, "Well isn't there an easier way?" Right? Like if we know this mistake is going to happen, can't we prevent it? Right? Like we'll send an angel or hide the pages or we'll tell Joseph like a firm "no," don't do it or you're dead. Like there's an easier way, right? There must have been an easier way than to like melt all this ore and rewrite the records and fashion new plates and do all that work all over again. Right?

But what I think is that Joseph was supposed to make that mistake. He was supposed to do it wrong and God knew he was going to do it wrong. But there was a lesson there that he could learn and no other way. Joseph never again let man's opinion be more important to him than God's. He learned that he only needed the approval of God and that that was the most important. And it was a lesson that he would need as he faced a life of criticism from others, right? Criticism even from other believers, even from his friends.

He needed to be able to do that wrong. To learn what he needed to, and become who he needed to be later. I think it means he was supposed to do it wrong and God prepared for it.

00:14:04:10 - 00:14:38:13
And I believe it is the same for you and me. When we think we shouldn't do it wrong, we don't allow for the learning that we came to do. We keep ourselves instead in a perpetual state of shame and condemnation, rather than understanding we need to do it wrong in order to learn and become. That Doing it wrong is the way. That doing it wrong is the plan and God prepared for it, right? He prepared plates for Joseph and he prepared an atonement for you. You were supposed to do it wrong and the idea that you need to do it right to be good enough is the lie.

Okay, the next way that we use the Gospel against us is that we use the commandments as sticks to beat ourselves up with rather than tools to make Earth life easier. And I was really really good at this. I was an expert at this, in fact. I would use the fact that I was inconsistent in my scripture study or by prayers or my temple worship or in the way I serve other people, as a way to beat myself up and be mean to myself.

And I would tell myself that I was a terrible person and a terrible disciple because I didn't do all these things that I was supposed to do. There were so many things that I thought I should be doing and I told myself I should be doing them. And I told myself that God surely must be disappointed in me.

And when we do that, when we think we should read our scriptures or we think we should say our prayers and then we don't, we feel guilt and shame. And these feelings cause us to hide. When we feel ashamed we hide. And hiding makes me want to pray even less, right? We hide from the imagined disappointments or disapproval of God Whenever we say "we should," we are working from a model of fear, that's going to just cause us to hide more and not show up the way we want to in our lives.

00:15:52:22 - 00:16:22:06
But I want you to think about why we were given commandments in the first place. Why does God create laws or recommend ways of living through the scriptures or through the prophets? I believe that everything he gives us is because he loves us. He wants to make it easier on us. He asks us to read the scriptures not to make our lives harder but to make them easier—to give us hope and instruction and examples in a fallen world when we're far away from him.

He asks us to pray not to make our lives harder but to make them easier—to give us a place to drop our burdens, and exchange our thoughts for his, as a way to access his blessings and a way for him to give us the things that he has to give us that are contingent on our asking. If you see the commandments, any of the commandments, as a way to ease some of the pain and heartache and burden of earth life, then the "shoulds" all just disappear. Instead of "I should" pray, "I should" read my scriptures, it becomes "I want to" or "I get to" or "I need to."

So when your brain gives you a laundry list of things you "should" be doing, recognize first that "should" is only going to produce shame. Should is a lie. And then step back and ask, "Why? Why does he recommend living in this way? Why does he think this will be better for me?" And ask yourself if that's what you want too. And then act on what you really want. Instead of "should," act from want, and see what that changes for you.

And maybe it will help you to think about this with the idea that we get into trouble whenever we're trying to change our behavior without changing how we feel, without changing our hearts. We're always evaluating our actions and then condemning our actions without really understanding that all of those actions are created by our feelings, which are created by our thoughts.

00:17:50:13 - 00:18:11:04
So our work is not in our behaviors or the things we are or aren't doing. Our work is to discover the feeling behind the behavior that we want to change and then change the thought creating that feeling. When we act from a feeling of love instead of fear or shame, it's going to change all of our behaviors.

Okay, that idea goes along with the next thing that I want to talk about. So often we use the Gospel against ourselves to judge ourselves and to judge others. We use all these "shoulds" against ourselves and others and create so much judgment of the way we're doing it and the way they are doing it.

Here's what I want you to know. Everybody is doing it wrong and they're supposed to. They need to. They need to do it wrong. Does that freak you out a little bit? Right? Like you're thinking like, "We're told to choose the right, April. There's nothing in there like 'choose the wrong.'"

But what I want to offer you is that sometimes we don't know what's right until we choose the wrong, until we choose another way. And when we judge others and think that they should do it like we do it, then we are missing the point of the Gospel. Christ didn't come to show us a better way so that we could then make our lives harder by judging ourselves and others. He was saying that love is the better way because it feels so much better to love instead of judge.

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And one of the most painful ways I see this show up in my life and in my clients lives is with our children. So our brains think that our children really need to live the gospel the way we think they should. We think that we know the path that their spiritual journey should take and then we judge them if their path varies from our plan, right? Or we judge ourselves—that we did something wrong or we didn't do enough things right.

And the worst part is they feel our judgment, right? And even if they don't, we feel it. And it feels terrible. And then we think feeling terrible is their fault. If only they would live their life in the right way, if only they would live and love the Gospel the way we think they should, then we could feel better.

But I want you to know that they are doing it exactly right. And the only reason you feel so terrible about it is because of the heavy judgment you have for them and for yourself. And when I say they are doing it exactly right, this is not a statement on the right and wrong of their choices from a moral standpoint. It's a way of understanding that their choices are always right because they have agency and because they are doing it the way they came to learn it. And that can't be wrong.

And I want you to know that when you can drop your judgement of them and the choices they make, and drop your judgment of you and what it means about the job you did, teaching and raising and parenting them, then all of this pain will disappear. And you can just love them. Which is all Christ wants us to do anyway.

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Another way that we use the gospel of Jesus Christ against ourselves is that we try to keep what I call a "salvation scorecard." Right? And we try to earn our salvation.

So when Christ was here on the earth he told the people so many times, "The law of Moses won't save you," right? "There is no salvation in the law. I am what saves you." And we read that and we're like, "I can't believe they didn't get that. Why did they think a law would save them, that if they followed the rules, they could save themselves?" Right? "Really? That's just crazy." But then we turn around and do it all the time.

Christians no longer live the law of Moses but sometimes we think that living Christ's law will save us. Right? That if we can be good enough and love enough and nice enough and serve enough that that's going to add points to our salvation scorecard. And that someday God will look at that scorecard and say, "Well it seems like you made a really valiant effort, right. I'll cover the rest."

But that's not how it worked. Christ paid the entire price for our salvation. Our salvation was his job and his alone. The work we do here doesn't add to that or subtract from that or pay him back or make us more acceptable for salvation. The law can't save you and all the works we do and all the commandments we obey, simply strengthen us make us holier, make us think like he did and act like he did, and that's going to give us a different Earth life experience and it will give us glory in the world to come. But it will not save us.

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We use the Gospel and the "rules" to add or subtract and see if we've done enough or to see if we've done all that we can or we've passed some mysterious threshold of enoughness to qualify for salvation. You can't qualify for it. It is not your job. Your job is to learn and grow and become. The Salvation is free. And nothing you can do pays for it.

We are using our finite brains to keep score of an infinite progression and it just doesn't work that way. When your brain says you aren't good enough or worthy enough for salvation, remember Christ—that he is infinitely worthy and our salvation is his job. I like to remind my brain, when it says I'm never gonna make it and that I'm not worthy, I like to remind it that none of that is my business anyway.

My business is becoming what I can through this earth life experience. My business is becoming what I can as I repent and change and choose—one choice, one opportunity, one experience at a time.

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So Brad Wilcox brilliantly compares this idea to taking piano lessons. If your mom signed you up for piano lessons and pays the teacher for piano lessons, when you go to practice, you don't pay your mom back. Practicing and learning the piano doesn't pay your mom back for the piano lessons. And it doesn't pay the piano teacher for instructing you. It doesn't pay anyone, right?

When you practice and learn skills on the piano then you gain skills to be able to play the piano. You are using the gift that your mother gave you to develop a skill and create a different life experience and increase your capacity to play the piano. In the same way, Christ offers salvation for free and we then have an opportunity to become and change by continuing to choose and repent, choose and repent, choose and repent. Until we become and develop the skills of love that we want and that he emulates.

Finally, I want to end today by talking about the idea that we try to access the gospel of love from a place of hate and self-loathing. Jesus said love everyone and we're like I hate that I can't do that. I hate that I can't love like he wants me to. Right?

We can never access his love from a place of self-hate. And I know how easy it is to want to use hating all of your faults and your flaws to get closer to him. But in reality any hate moves us farther away from him. To access divine love we have to be in a position to feel love and we can't do that when we think painful, hateful, unkind thoughts about ourselves.

00:25:09:17 - 00:25:41:29
So I had this experience with one of my children. They made a mistake and they went to pray and repent. And they came back to me and they said, "I can't feel anything. He must hate me. I can't feel his love. He won't forgive me." So as we talked about it I asked them what were they thinking as they prayed. And they said they were thinking about how terrible they were, and how they shouldn't have made that mistake, and how they felt so bad about it, and they were so mad at themselves. They had these thoughts about how terrible they were and those produced feelings of shame and self-loathing.

And so then filled with shame and self-loathing they could never feel God's love, right? The truth is God's love is always there. It is always extended to each of us. It is the constant in our lives. But we keep ourselves from feeling it with the thoughts we think about ourselves.

So there's this part in the Book of Mormon where Mormon is talking to his son and he's just told him all these terrible things that have happened to their people, all the destruction that's happened to the Nephite nation, and to their people. And then he says this at the end of this he says, "May not the things which I have written grieve thee, to weigh thee down unto death, but may Christ lift the up, and may his sufferings and death, and the showing of his body and to our fathers, and his mercy, and his long-suffering, and the hope of his glory and of eternal life rest in your mind forever." Right?

He says, "Don't think about all the horror. Don't think about all these terrible things. But put your mind on Christ and His Love and His mercy and his glory and his long suffering," right? "Put your mind there and rejoice in that."

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And I think that can be so helpful as we go to apply the gospel of Jesus Christ to ourselves. Right? Yes, you are a mess. Yes, you have created destruction and ruin and pain, but don't let the thought of that weigh you down. Put your mind and your thoughts on Christ and His promises—who he is and how he loves. Right? When we think of his love and what he offers us, then we can feel that love.

And that will change us. No self-loathing is necessary. Hate is not necessary for change. If we're simply thinking about the destruction and the ruin and the pain that we've created, we're never going to be able to access that love. We have to think different thoughts and the thoughts are that "his love conquers all."

Hating ourselves is not necessary for change. Self-destruction won't help you become what you can become. Becoming is a creationary process and becoming is created through love. You don't have to dismantle everything before you come to him. He wants you as you are, without condemnation, and then from there he beckons you to become even more.

In our lives we are striving to hear him and hear his voice in our life and we can't hear him and access his love when the chatter in our own head and our own judgments is so loud that we can't hear anything else. That chatter of self-loathing is going to drown out his voice every time. To access his love and create change in our life we have to nurture thoughts that create love for him and love for ourself.

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So I was raised with the gospel of Jesus Christ, right? I was a student. I was a believer. I knew the things he taught and the way he lived and the salvation he offered. And I tried to pattern my life after his instructions. But in doing so I spent so many years using all of it against myself, when I fell short or I made mistakes and I didn't do it perfectly.

But when I learned how the brain works and how my thoughts were creating my life, I finally understood how I was using these negative thoughts about myself to keep me from him and to keep me from his love.

When I learned that every feeling I have was created by a thought, then I could finally take the commandment to love one another and to love God and love my neighbor and apply it like I never could before. Because to love, I simply had to change how I thought about myself, how I thought about others, and how I thought about God. It made the ideal that Christ offered me, practical for me for the first time in my life.

I learned not just that I should love but I learned how I could, and it was always by changing my thoughts. And all I had to do was keep practicing that and practicing that over and over again, without self-hate, without self-loathing, and without condemning myself.

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And this is the work that I love to do with my clients—to show them that to apply the gospel more fully and feel the joy and hope and love that Christ offers, they only have to change their thoughts about themselves, about the people in their lives and their judgment for them, and about God and the abundance of his love. And I want you to know that if you are ready to stop using the Gospel you love against yourself, I can show you how to do that in a way that really works.

Okay, my friends, that's what I have for you today. Don't use the standard that Christ set against yourself. Use that gap and his demonstration of what's possible to inspire you and to intensify your worship and awe of him. Remember that you are in a learning environment, not a final exam. You're supposed to do it wrong. Use the commandments as a way to relieve the burdens of Earth life and make your life easier. Drop your judgment of yourself and of others and just throw away your scorecard. You can't earn or qualify for anything. You can only become through practice and that's what he invites you to do. That's what his sacrifice allows you to do. To practice again and again and again. And finally pursue your own discipleship from a place of love—love for him and love for yourself.

00:31:01:14 - 00:31:31:06
Christ made it possible for each of us to be able to come to earth and learn and try over and over and over again. The opportunity that that gives us to grow in an eternal way is one of the most awesome, incredible gifts of being a human being and a disciple of Christ. And you never have to use that gift against yourself! And that, my friends, is 100 percent awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!