The Viable Alternative

The other day I had a quite disturbing conversation with a Christian who was saying that having self-confidence and high self-esteem was of the Devil and leads to self-destruction.

NONSENSE!

Okay, I do get his point. He was saying that when a person gets overly self-confident, his Ego starts to tell them that he’s indestructible, infallible and that he knows more than God and thus doesn’t need His guidance, and with that, he starts to make stupid decisions that eventually leads to his downfall.

What he and many Christians don’t get is that there is room for being self confident and having a healthy self esteem while putting your full trust in God to guide you, sustain you and help you become successful.

Didn’t the Master say that the two greatest commandments were, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ and second “Love your neighbour as yourself?” (Matthew 22:38-29).

This means that in order to have a fully successful walk on this Earth, one must first have a strong relationship with God, then himself, and then his fellow human being. It also points to the fact that you in order to fully love your neighbour, you have to love yourself first, as you can’t give to others what you don’t have for yourself.

God created us as infinitely amazing beings in his own image, illustrated both in Psalm 139:4 – “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” and in Genesis where it says we were created in His own image.

There are few greater compliments than to admire and appreciate what someone created. God created each of us with our own unique mix of abilities meant to fulfill a purpose that He needs us to fulfill. He also gave us dominion over the Earth.

Obviously God thought highly enough of us and deemed us worthy to create us with all the wonderful abilities we have with a unique purpose, so there is nothing wrong with having a realistic respect for or favourable impression of ourselves which is what high self esteem is defined as.

The problem is that many Christians walk around with this idiotic mindset that they’re worthless sinners, unworthy of any good in life and that life has to be a constant hell in order for them to atone for their carnal, sinful nature. Thus, when you say words like “High self-esteem” they get up in arms and say it’s of the Devil.

High self-esteem oversteps its bounds when you start to worship the created thing rather than the Creator. When you do that, you’re taking your eyes off the Source and thus cutting yourself off from your power, which leads to your destruction.

It’s like this, if you want to properly use any machine or object, it makes sense to go to who created that thing in order to learn how to properly use it, because the person who created that thing knows all the ins and outs, bells and whistles, and nooks and crannies to make it function to its maximum potential. The object can be admired, but in order to make full use of it, you have to got to the one who created it.

It’s the same with us. We have all these wonderful gifts and abilities that we catch glimpse of in our lives, however, to make the maximum possible use of them, it’s wise to go to God to guide and empower us to live to our greatest potential. As we walk with Him, He leads, guides and teaches us, which gives us a greater knowledge, and appreciation of what we have.

He also puts desires on our hearts that seem bigger than what we can accomplish, and he puts us through trials and tribulations so that if we surrender to Him, we allow Him to work through us to show us not only His strength, but also the strength, abilities and fortitude that He has given to us. Thus, we gain confidence in our abilities such that when we face similar challenges we know we’re capable to tackle them because we’ve done it before and also we gain a confidence in God that with Him we can overcome any challenge or trial.

Our self esteem and self confidence crosses the line into arrogance and being “full of ourselves” when we look at our past accomplishments and abilities and start believing that we’re better than others because of them, and we get an inflated sense of our abilities such that we think we don’t need God anymore and that we can do it all by our lone selves.

Other than that, a healthy walk is surrendering to God as our Source so we can learn about Him and also learn about ourselves and appreciate BOTH.

It is the ones with high self-esteem who is truly humble because they’re not controlled by their egos which measure a person’s worth by one’s accomplishments, possessions, status, success etc. Such people think so highly of themselves because they know what makes them worthy is the fact that God created them for a unique purpose, as such, they esteem themselves too highly to submit to anyone else but God.

It is not humble or holy to have a low self esteem where you proclaim with pride that you’re not worthy of God’s blessings because you’re a worthless sinner who is nothing in God’s eyes. God blesses you because He sees you as worthy, or else He won’t be wasting his blessings on you in the first place. Also, take it from my personal experience, if you think yourself as unworthy of God’s blessings, you’ll block His ability to bless you and sabotage any success He tries to give you.

Remember, the reason why God couldn’t use the Israelites to conquer the Promised Land was because they saw themselves as grasshoppers.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love