Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
I think we all battle with issues that are rooted in our identity. We live in a culture that is not conducive to developing a proper biblical self-image and worth. There is also a struggle within the church community. Some say the church in general can be more hostile than the world when it comes to identity.
The bottom line is that God never intended for us to get our core identity from our culture, church, profession or even our family, but rather, from Him who created us. A person who continually seeks their self-image and worth apart from the Lord is in danger of making a big mess of their life.
The word image speaks about the imagination that is inside you. Self-image is the view a person holds of himself. It is the estimate one makes of one’s self. Sometimes that estimate is accurate; sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is conscious; at other times, it is unconscious. Sometimes our self-image and worth is unconscious because it is too painful to face what we really think about ourselves.
Most of us have mixed feelings about ourselves. We fluctuate between periods of relative contentment and times of self-dissatisfaction. Sometimes we like ourselves; sometimes we don’t. When we feel right about ourselves, we are happy, confident, relaxed, and alert. When we don’t, we become pressured, anxious, irritable, or down.
Some people have such a poor self-image that they are constantly riddled with self-doubt, depression, and feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. I was one of those people at one time, but not anymore.
As a young Christian I thought the more you devalued yourself, the more you claimed you are little, the closer you could be with God. That is only half the story. We all have sinned and fallen short of His glory, but the other half of the story is that we are the righteousness of God in Christ right now (2 Cor. 5:21).
Too many believers live in the first half of the story. The enemy has deceived them into seeing themselves as worthless and before long they behave like they are worthless. We become what we see (2 Cor. 3:18). Can you imagine yourself as the righteousness of God?
This is illustrated in the gospels in the calling of Matthew. Mark and Luke state Jesus saw a tax collector named Matthew (Mark 2:14, Luke 5:27). However, by Matthew’s own account he says Jesus saw a man that collected taxes (Matt. 9:9). Big difference. Jesus did not make him what He did, He saw a man. Jesus was speaking right to the core of Matthew’s self-image and worth because a tax collector was considered a very bad person in the culture of Jesus time.
You can see yourself as others see you or you can see yourself as you see you. But, like Matthew what God wants is for us to see ourselves as He sees us. That is the only right image and value of ourselves.
Many Blessings, BW