Yup,
you’ve been there.
Staring in the mirror, thinking, My God, are you serious? Why did You make me look like this? If you
have never had this encounter, you are either headless or a ghost, or perhaps
both. For me, I didn’t like my smile, my body, or my unique quirks. Basically
everything! I thought I was weird and awkward. Most of the time, I still do.
God has created you in a special way.
He formed
everything about you: your looks, personality, talents, and essence. It’s easy
to think that we have to look to other people in order to define who we are.
What is even more amazing is that God has called us to be someone and yet we
often feel very inadequate because of how we perceive our self-worth.
As a Christian, I know that the word “self” needs to be
handled with care. We are not called “Self-tian” though we do act like that. To
be a Christian is to be “Christ-like.” We have this life for Jesus, to glorify Him.
If we are so busy looking at our “self,” our focus gets taken off Christ.
Self-worth is the value of what you
perceive you are worth as a person. To be “worth” something, we have to have a
price. If we feel a high level of self-worth, we seem to have higher standards
and expect a higher level of respect. If we have low self-worth, we feel like we
have no value and no respect.
I used to think that my self-worth depended on the people
around me, that if I measured up to certain people who I thought had a higher
level of self-worth, it would somehow, miraculously rub off on me. What that
did was just cause me to feel worse about myself as a person! I felt like a
fake and a loser. I was trying to measure my value by comparing it to other
humans.
The amazing
thing is, we can look at the Scriptures, and Jesus lets us know exactly how
much each of us are worth!
“Let
this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of
God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no
reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the
likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and
became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).
God reminds us that each of us has worth; true worth. How do we know? By looking at the price
that Jesus paid for our opportunity of salvation! We can measure our true worth
by what He has done for all of us: becoming the sacrifice for our sins so that
we may have eternal life!
Jesus died
for us on the cross at Calvary, shedding His own blood for His precious sons
and daughters. Surely through that revelation we see how much we are worth.
When we look at our self-worth, we usually compare ourselves to others, and
that is how we determine what our value is. This is awful to do because we are
all humans and are all guilty of sin. Why
do we seek approval and measurement of worth from each other? When we
realize that the price for our salvation was paid by His blood because of how
much He loves us, that’s when we see our true worth in Jesus. He thought we
were worth His own life!
Through the love that Jesus has shown, through
His selfless sacrifice for us, we grow to love our God. Your self-worth is not
defined by what others say and do; it’s defined by what Jesus said and did!
- Excerpt from Chapter 6 of my new book "The Palace Keepers: Protecting the Purity of the Heart", available here for Kindle/iPad/Tablet users or here in paperback
