Beyond Esteem

Our society often deals with the issue of personal contentment within the realm of self-esteem. How good we feel about ourselves usually has to do with how much we allow the opinions of others affect us. In my opinion, we can never have the proper amount of self-esteem until we recognize who actually is the ultimate judge.

A lot of what I'm about to say comes from Timothy Keller's podcast entitled "The Sickness Unto Death", so if you don't like my version of things you should listen to his sermon for a better understanding. The basis for my understanding of how a Christian should handle the matter of self-esteem comes from 1 Corinthians 4:3-4, which says "I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me." Here, we see that Paul's perspective of self-esteem is entirely off the map because we are usually at one end of the two extremes of self-esteem. We either have too high of a regard for ourselves, causing us to be arrogant, self righteous, and prideful or we have too little self-esteem causing us to be depressed, insecure, and unstable. 

To describe things as concisely as possible I'll just say that we are to live beyond esteem. Paul says he doesn't even judge himself, only God judges. That should bring a profound sense of peace to our lives as God loves us completely and unconditionally so there is no standard that we must live up to in order to be accepted. When we rely on boosting our self-esteem through anyone but God we will always come up empty. What tends to happen most often is that we seek the cheapest, easiest forms of approval in order to gain the quickest high we can get. Just look at Facebook for example. We post pictures and hope to gain as many "likes" as possible, or we post what we hope to be funny, exciting or witty status updates that we hope will catch the eye of all those with whom we are "friends". On that note, we collect facebook friends like trophies that represent our self-worth in the world. It's ridiculous and it creates an all too fragile reality for far too many people because our self-esteem is raised just only half as much as it is lowered by this superficial conduct.

The flipside to this reality are those people who isolate themselves in their own personal opinions and become closed off to the thought of anyone else's point of view. It seems like this is a product of our American individualistic culture that we can't comprehend living beyond our own personal thoughts about ourselves because we elevate our opinions to the status of Godhood. We should care about what others think of us to some degree so we never loose accountability but we should never find our self worth in the opinion of any man or woman. I say all this as the chief among sinners. I have found myself on both sides of the coin in this instance so I know how detrimental they can be. I am learning to rely on God's approval alone but it is a complicated process. These habits are ingrained in us from our families, friends, and culture. We have to shake off the chains of false self-esteem and realize that the One who created us thinks that we are beautiful, interesting, lovely people despite all of our flaws. Once we realize that, every ounce of judgement is gone and we can finally accept ourselves as God does.