"Become a Better Me": Why I Don't Really Want To

I met Joel Osteen in 2005, at the grand opening of the Lakewood Church's new digs at the Compaq Center. I was fortunate enough to sit in the front row and enjoy a nice meal afterward for VIPs, journalists, friends of the family, etc. The facility is stunning, the staff friendlier than Asian flight attendants and the music pitch perfect. The sermon that muggy Houston morning was about how the Osteen family overcame great odds in building a great church ... and (you guessed it) how you too can overcome great odds and be everything God wants you to be. Osteen was gracious, with his self-deprecating humor and "awe-shucks" persona. I have no reason to doubt that his integrity behind the scenes is beyond reproach.

The saddest part of the story, however, is to see a man with so much influence, so many people hanging on his every word, so many resources at his disposal for speaking the truth, squander the opportunity every time he steps behind the microphone or picks up a pen.

I read Osteen's first book, Your Best Life Now, but have no intention of reading his latest tome, Become a Better You. Unless something dramatically has changed in Osteen's life and theology (and this interview on CBS suggests it has not), this latest book is likely more of the same self-help-wrapped-in-Christian-lingo. For me, it has no discernible relation to the biblical gospel that I so desperately need on a daily basis.

I'm not interested in having a "better life"--my life is already better than that of most people in the world. I'm called to live a life that is effectively expended for the expansion of the gospel--whether by living or dying, poverty or riches, sickness or health, happiness or sadness.

I'm not interested in "becoming a better me"--and I would imagine that the prospect of me becoming a better version of myself is rather distasteful to God, as well. I'm called to self-sacrifice, not self-improvement. The improvement part's easy--I hate sacrifice.

Perhaps Osteen's message is not for people like me who have been raised in the church, are familiar with the gospel and whose personal and family lives are for the most part together. Maybe it's for the down-and-out, the desperate, the lonely, the depressed, people on the verge of financial collapse. But why bait the hook with a message of earthly self-improvement, hiding from people the reality of a gospel the demands of which are so uncomfortable and the benefits of which cannot be measured with the standards of Western culture?