NO NEED TO BUILD OUR SELF-ESTEEM

 

Deriving an accurate self-estimation is essential. It’s like navigating a ship. The captain needs to know its capacities – what water and weather it can endure and how to optimally maintain it. When we have accurate self-knowledge, we too can navigate with greater ease.

 

However, obtaining this knowledge is both rare and humbling. It requires us to confront what is painful, so painful that we have suppressed it. It reveals our failures, inadequacies, and vulnerabilities. However, this knowledge can also be the most edifying thing imaginable. It can gives us an awareness of how much we are beloved by our Creator and Redeemer, who is always looking after our welfare (Romans 8:28):

 

·       The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. The face of the LORD is against those who do evil, to cut off the memory of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. (Psalm 34:15-18)

 

We are holy and precious in His estimation. Therefore, we don’t have to fight our own battles, win His approval, or take revenge:

·       Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. (1 Co 3:16–17)

 

He loves His children with a love that surpasses a mother’s love. Therefore, Paul prayed that we:

·       may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19)

 

However, often God does not allow us to see the extent of His love for us, lest we be tempted to simply bask in it, rather than performing the work to which we have been called. Let me try to illustrate. The Lord revealed to His servant Abraham that the evil city of Sodom faced destruction. However, Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family resided there. He therefore interceded with the Lord on behalf of his family:

·       The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him.” Then the LORD said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.” (Genesis 1:18-20)

 

Abraham knew that his only hope was in the mercy of God:

 

·       …Abraham still stood before the LORD. Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” 26 And the LORD said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

 

Finally, Abraham persisted to whittle the number down to 10:

 

·       “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” (Genesis 18:17:32)

 

There were not even ten righteous in Sodom. Even the righteousness of Lot and his two daughters seem highly questionable to us. After their rescue, the two daughters got their father drunk to have Lot impregnate them, thinking that there were no longer any other available men. Nevertheless, the two angels recued the three.

 

The next scene brings us back to Abraham. In the morning, he went to the mountainside to see if the Lord had destroyed Sodom and the surrounding cities. The billowing smoke gave him his answer. Immediately, he packed his tent and moved his family miles away to Beersheba, away from the carnage, perhaps never to learn of the fate of his remaining family. Sometimes, the Lord hides his blessings, and requires us to walk by faith and not by sight.

 

However, there is a greater lesson embedded in this account, a lesson about the extent of God’s love for His children and how He ennobles us beyond anything we can imagine. We are the conduits for His mercy to the world. Had there been only ten righteous in the Sodom City, our Lord would have spared it for the sake of those ten. We too are such conduits of the mercy of God. However, we remain unaware of how necessary we are to the welfare of our neighbors, what a blessing we are to our sinful nation. I believe that it is because of our presence and prayers that the Lord has been patient with our sinful nation, which has now become perhaps the abortion, pornography, sex-trafficking, and perversions of the world. How ironic that we, who have been the source of God’s patience and blessings have also become one of the most despised and persecuted groups of people!

 

In this, we stand in the likeness of Jesus, who had been despised, rejected, and murdered and yet, He became the Source of salvation for the entire world.

Consequently, we do not have to build our self-esteem with the filthy rags of our own glory. Instead, we can simply bask in the way that our Savior sees us. As we grow in this knowledge, we shed our need for the approval of the world and their estimation of us. We know the truth, and the truth has set us free from so many of our burdens (John 8:31-32). Let us delight ourselves in the One who has died for us, even when we hated Him:

 

·       God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. (Romans 5:8-10)