When you feel worthless, the world will tell you that you should develop a sense of self worth. They will tell you to build you self esteem. Self esteem is self estimation. We are being told to reevaluate ourselves and assign ourselves value. All of this thinking is humanistic. Our value is not established by us. Rather, is is already established by the blood of Christ and the depth of Papa’s desire. Unbelievers need self esteem because they are unable to access God’s esteem. But, we have full access.
No believer in Christ should ever feel worthless. This feeling results from an identity that is self established and then crushed by life or people. Sons get their identity from Holy Spirit. This identity can never be crushed because it is established by God and our value is built into this identity. If we are experiencing negative emotion, it is evidence that a part of our identity is not resting on what God declares.
The biggest problem with self esteem is that we are placing our trust in our self evaluation. We are in fact sitting on the throne of our own heart. If Christ is Lord, then He should be on this throne. His evaluation should be supreme.
Self esteem also has inherent holes in it. Because it is just our opinion of ourselves, we subconsciously know that it cannot be relied upon. In our heart of hearts we will always be questioning our value if we build our own esteem. As we discuss elsewhere in this book, sin is tied directly to this questioning. We have been building our esteem yet without knowing it the condemnation identity has been what is motivating us.
Self esteem is an outgrowth of the condemnation identity. In condemnation, we are afraid to go to God to get His evaluation of us, fearing that He has nothing but rejection for us. We are building self esteem in order to fix the condemnation. But self evaluation cannot fix the fear that you don’t matter, or that you are really just a failure. This must be fixed by an authority that is higher than us. We need God to tell us if we are worthless or not, in order for us to truly know what the truth is. We can never actually trust our own evaluation. It is this paradox, the fear of rejection by God, yet the need to hear His answer to if we are rejected, that causes us to live double minded. If we are ever to overcome, then we will have to push past our fear of rejection and ask the questions that our heart is afraid to ask. Even more, we need to continue asking them until our hearts trust the answer that we hear.