The call to holiness, as I have tried to indicate, is a call to accept and understand our true selves. Through inner healing we discovers our true selves. Unfortunately, many Christians misinterpret Jesus’ call for “death to self”. We hear this frequently in Christian literature. The death that Jesus calls for is death to the false self, not the true self. Our true self, however, cannot be found without Jesus as a part of the equation. We discover our true self when we take into consideration that Jesus is God’s revelation about who we are as   human beings, as God’s children. Jesus surely didn’t put His true self to death. He did, by His attitudes and behaviors, put to death any false understanding of Himself. He first and foremost saw Himself as a Son of God. We are called to adopt this same understanding of ourselves. We are sons and daughters of God. That is how God created us.

I think that most people would agree with me when I say that if and when we come to an understanding of ourselves as children of God, we change and the whole world changes.

All through the ages, the great saints who have gone before us, our spiritual parents, have witnessed to the biblical truth that God has made us to give Him praise by being the persons we are. As St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

Again, we see the difference between that to which Jesus calls us and that to which totally humanistic self-realization calls us. Inner healing and spiritual growth are not self-realization: they are not self-finding self, for that is an impossibility. Inner healing is Jesus finding our true selves; it is Jesus-centered.

The call to holiness is to see ourselves in the same way that Jesus did, namely as children of God. This means we incorporate the Jesus way of living.