Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
I lived my much of my pre-salvation years secretly believing I didn’t measure up. Later, as a believer, I looked at most of my Christian friends and felt they had it together and I didn’t. They seemed spiritual and I didn’t think I was. I would go to church and everyone seemed to really love the Lord and worship Him so passionately. I was always tempted to forsake the church and following God because of those feelings.
My introvert, less expressive self concluded that I wasn’t as good as everyone at church. I didn’t feel I was worthy of God’s love. I believed there was something wrong deep inside of me, and no one including God, really wanted me around. All that created so much havoc in my life. I struggled with resentment, sarcasm and criticism of others. I was consumed with a poverty spirit.
Over the years, I had worked and grown through a lot of that twisted thinking, but a root issue was still there. I wasn’t 100% convinced in my heart that I was lovable. I didn’t believe I was worthy of God’s love.
When the Father began to work in the depth of my heart, it was like a gardener pulling weeds and vines, methodically working His way back to that one big nasty lie.
In Romans 8:38-39, Paul goes through a list of some very powerful things that have no power to stop God’s love for us. He tells us that the love of God is so great that not even death can separate us from His love. But there is one thing Paul leaves out. By omission, Paul warned us of the dangers of living from our hurtful past. In terms of the love of God, our hurtful past has more power than death!
Our hurtful past has no power to change us, but it has great power to bind and warp our thinking. It can hinder us from receiving the love of God. We must allow God to deal with our painful past in order to truly know Him as our loving Father.
Mark Maudlin from Grace Life International in Charlotte brought insight on this.
“Researchers tell us that 80-85% of people around the world suffer from low self-esteem. I think most of us believe that those who have money, fame and a winning personality are exempt from this. However, when interviewed, some of those famous people surprise us with their candidness about their struggle with self-esteem.
Demi Moore, in a 2012 interview with Harper’s Bazaar said, “What scares me is that I’m going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I’m really not lovable, that I’m not worthy of being loved. That there’s something fundamentally wrong with me…and that I wasn’t wanted here in the first place.”
Will Smith said, “I still doubt myself every single day. What people believe is my self-confidence, is actually my reaction to fear.”
Low self-esteem is a thinking disorder in which an individual views him/herself as inadequate, unlovable, and/or incompetent. We conclude that we simply aren’t as good as other people, not in a moral sense, but in the realm of lovability.
That is what it all kind of comes down to, isn’t it? Do we believe in our hearts that we are lovable? How we determine whether we are lovable is the difference between having good self-esteem or low self-esteem.”
Only God, the Father can actually convince you that you are lovable. If you let Him into the depths of your heart He will.
Many Blessings, BW