Series: Healing For Damaged Emotions
#5 Healing Our Low Self Esteem Part 2
Mar 8, 2009
Our emotional lives are a complicated mixture of mind, body, and spirit. Our self-perception is influenced by many factors including our emotional life. Emotions can be good or they can be bad. In fact the same emotion like anger can be both good and bad depending on the situation. There is unrighteous anger and there is righteous anger—one bad and one good. Emotions are influenced by our nature as well as by the environment in which we were nurtured. Our goal in this series is to bring us to an healthy emotional life.
It is my belief that God created the heavens and the earth, that God created Adam and Eve as a triplex creature of body, mind, and spirit. It is also my belief that sin has damaged us beyond natural repair and that damage affects our bodies, our minds, and our spirits. It is also my belief that only God through Christ can restore us to health—physical, mental and spiritual health. This health, this salvation, is made possible through the atoning and sacrificial work of Jesus on the cross of Calvary. That event opened us, God’s highest creation, to the possibility of wholeness, completeness, and of being human as God originally intended. You are not fully human apart from Christ nor can you be healthy in body, mind, and spirit apart from Christ. As we look at the human creation, some aspects of us are easily categorized into body, mind, or spirit. Pride for example is a matter of the spirit and the Bible speaks to the issue of pride. What complicates matters is that aspect of our being in which the body, mind and spirit overlap and intertwine. Then things can become intriguing and quite complicated. Pride, a matter of the spirit, also affects our minds and our emotions, which in turn affects our bodies. Hence when we are damaged physically we get our bodies healed. When our spirits are damaged, we get our spirits healed by way of repentance, forgiveness, grace and faith. When our minds are damaged, we get our emotions healed by the inner working of God’s Holy Spirit.
Keep in mind that we are speaking of healing for damaged emotions for all people through Christ. He is the ultimate healer of our minds. Keep also in mind that when we speak of low self-esteem as Satan’s deadliest weapon, we are speaking to those who are Christians by redemption, those who have trusted in Jesus as their personal Savior, and who have an ongoing relationship with Him. Our self-esteem then is founded not in ourselves but in and through Christ.
As we continue in this area of self-esteem and self-worth, a person’s self-concept is a culmination of 4 sources: the outer world, the inner world, Satan, and God. We have looked at the outer world where we see ourselves through the mirrors of our parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, teachers, church, pastors, coaches, et al. The second source is our temperament. Some people are naturally compliant and others by nature are defiant. Some are sensitive while others are more tough-skinned. Some are people oriented while others are prone to accomplish tasks. One is neither right nor wrong nor better than another. The 3rd source of our self-concept is Satan. Satan uses our feelings, our emotions against us be creating doubt, fear, anger, envy, hatred, etc. Satan uses inferiority, inadequacy, and self-belittling to defeat us as Christians thus preventing us from reaching our full potential in and through Christ.
The fourth source of our self-concept is God. We move now from the problem of low-self esteem to the power of a new and proper Christian self-image. In Philippians 2:3 Paul writes, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.” In Sunday School I learned that the way of JOY was this: Jesus, Others and then You and that equals JOY. This is what Paul is talking about here. Put aside your self-centered pride where you are the center of the universe and be humble by considering others better than yourself. What does that mean? The key lies in understanding what humility is. Many of us who grew up in the Protestant church (I can’t speak for the Roman Catholic Church) came to understand humility as thinking others better than yourself, but we exacerbated that thinking by adding this caveat: in order to make others better than ourselves, we put ourselves down thinking that we were far less worthy, less important, and of no account. The result was that we belittled ourselves into humility believing that we were actually being obedient, and doing that which would bring us JOY—Jesus, Others and then You last. So we put ourselves down in order to lift others up. Hence we succumbed to Satan’s lie that we had no self-worth and the more we put ourselves down the more righteous and spiritual we thought we became. One Christian man confessed, “For years I have said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ but what I was really doing was “Love thy neighbor and hate myself.’” A woman admitted, “I thought God wanted me to dislike myself in order for me to stay humble.”
What we are talking about is proper and healthy self-esteem—not prideful self-esteem that needs no God nor anyone else, nor do we need the opposite of thinking that we have to grovel in the dirt, i.e. being humble, to gain God’s favor and blessing.
Our sin nature makes us prone to love ourselves more than God or anyone else, but hating ourselves and who God made us is not the answer. We see this in intimacy of marriage. The Bible teaches that marriage is a model of our relationship with Christ. He is the Bridegroom and we are the bride. Hear what Paul writes in Eph 5:28, (NASB), “Husbands ought also to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it.” JB Phillips puts it this way, “The love a man gives his wife is the extending of his love for himself to enfold her, and that is what Christ does for His body, the church [ie Christians].” A proper self-concept, self-esteem, and self-worth is vital and necessary if you are going to be a good husband or wife. I firmly believe that in order to really love your wife or husband, it has to flow out of a love for yourself and you can only love yourself as you know and experience God’s love for you. Proper self-love destroys the self-centered self-love that destroys so many marriages. God’s loves flows into us to enable us to love ourselves as He made us, and then we are empowered to love others as we love ourselves.
Here’s the irony in this topic of low self-esteem. People who have low self-esteem can really be self-centered and self-focused. This person with low self-esteem is always trying to prove himself and has to be ‘right’ in every situation. A person with low self-esteem can also be a doormat for other people to use and abuse--all the while he is thinking that he is being humble and other person centered. He may even become a ‘praise-a-holic’ thriving on the affirmation and praises of people and even setting himself up to reap those praises. All this is an effort to feel good about himself. You cannot unconditionally love others when you are in constant need of affirming yourself.
Putting yourself down, belittling yourself, and thinking yourself as nothing is not humility neither is it a characteristic of righteousness nor holiness of heart and life.
The issue before us is this: will we listen to those around us believing their view of us? Will we hear the inner voice telling us that we are dumb and stupid? Will we take to heart Satan’s lies about us that we are not worth the air we breathe? Or will we receive our self-esteem from God and His Word?
Let me share with you some of the things the Bible says.
Romans 12:3, “For by the grace given me I say to everyone of you: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Sober judgment cuts both ways.
1 John 1:3, “Consider the incredible love the Father has shown us in allowing us to be called ‘children of God.’”
Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Matthew 7:11, “If you then though you are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!”
Philippians 4:19, “God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory.”
Philippians 1:5, “Let this mind be in your which was also in Christ Jesus.”
Are you going to get to your ideas about yourself from the distortions of your childhood? From past hurts, disappointments? From the lies of Satan? When Paul admonished us to evaluate ourselves with sober judgment he also said, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” [ie the seat of your emotions.] The work of God’s Spirit in transforming our minds does not happen overnight. God’s transforming work takes time as we partner with Him so that He can heal our damaged emotions and give us a godly self-esteem from His Word and His Spirit living within us.
Let me encourage you to enter into the healing process. Let God love you and let Him teach you to love yourself and how to love others. Then you will have real JOY!