Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. - 1 Peter 5:8
Maybe he’s been chewing on you? Some of the most powerful weapons in Satan's arsenal are psychological. Fear is one of these. Doubt is another. Anger, hostility, worry, and of course, guilt. Long-standing guilt can be hard to shake off and you don’t easily recognize the symptoms or how guilt is manifest in your life. It seems to hang on even after a Christian accepts God’s gifts of forgiveness and pardoning grace.
An uneasy sense of self-condemnation ensnares many Christians like a disabling paralysis. They find themselves defeated by the most powerful psychological weapon that Satan uses against Christians. In today’s humanist oriented culture, where there’s a psychological explanation for everything wrong with people... it’s called low self-esteem.
Low self-esteem is a gut-level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth. This feeling can shackle Christians in spite of God’s promises, in spite of His love for you, in spite of your faith and knowledge of God's Word.
Fear, Doubt and Uncertainty
I am sure God grieves over this matter of how “low self-esteem” affects the minds of Christians. He grieves over the paralysis of low self-esteem that blunts our potential to be effective servants for Him. Jesus told a parable about the talents. The man with the one talent was immobilized by fear and feelings of inadequacy. Because he was so afraid of failure, he didn't invest his talent, but buried it in the ground, thinking that playing it safe was his best course of action. His life was a frozen asset - frozen by fear of rejection by the master, fear of failure, fear of comparison to the other two who were making their investments, fear of taking a risk.
He did what a lot of Christians with low self-esteem do - nothing. And that is exactly what Satan wants for Christians - to be so tied up by fear, doubt and uncertainty that we are tied down, frozen, paralyzed, settling into a life far below our potential.
Low self-esteem destroys our hopes, dreams and our visions. Maybe you’ve heard this... "Neurotics are people who build castles in the air; psychotics are those who move into them; and psychiatrists are the ones who collect the rent"!
Fear “of” the Promised of God
One of the Bible’s greatest illustrations of what fear, doubt and uncertainty can do to one’s confidence is in the Old Testament, in the Book of Numbers, chapter 13 and 14. It’s the account of God’s vision for His people, a bold and beautiful future. It’s His promise to bring them to a land that would be their own... where they would live in harmony with Him. He has painted for the Hebrew people, newly freed from Egyptian slavery, a magnificent picture of “their” Promised Land... one flowing with milk and honey, a land, they would possess. God guides them to the very edge of their Promised Land; they were poised on the verge of living out the bold plan God had crafted for them. What happens? Moses get orders from the Lord... to send into the land a military-style recon team to look it over, check it out... report back.
Moses sent the cream of the crop, the best man from each tribe. And he fully expected that the realities they would discover in Canaan would confirm God's plan and promise. In a sense they did, for all of the scouts agreed... It's a fantastic land. There was an abundance of fruit, crops, live stock, everything you would want or could imagine. And the honey... well it was the sweetest you would ever taste! (Numbers 13:23) So what happens...? Read the following report of the recon team...
28 But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there.The envoys began to weep and to be filled with fear. Only Caleb and Joshua had a different story. Oh, they agreed on all the facts. Their observations were the same; but because their perceptions were different, their conclusions were different. Why? Because Caleb was a man of a different spirit (Numbers 14:24). Caleb and Joshua had no grasshopper esteem of themselves. They said, "Of course the people are big, but don't fear them. The Lord is with us. We don't care how big they are; we can eat them up just like bread, and we can do this because it is God's will for us. It is God's dream, and He delights to do it in us and through us. He'll give us our dream and give us our land. 31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” Numbers 13:28; 31-33 (NIV)
The dream was ready. God was ready. But the people were not, because of their fear, doubt and uncertainty... the fuel of low self-esteem. They forgot that they were children of God, benefactors of His unfathomable power and might. They had already forgotten what He had done to free them from slavery in Egypt just a few weeks before.
Do you sometimes feel the way this recon patrol felt as they scouted the Promised land? Probably so, and more often that you care to admit. Our dreams are delayed or destroyed because Satan tricks us into thinking of ourselves as grasshoppers, small, insignificant, incapable of doing the things God desires from us.
And as a result we never realize our full potential as a son or a daughter of God. We are filled with fears and doubts... inferiority, and inadequacy. Think about your relationship with God. It follows quite naturally, that if you consider yourself inferior or worthless, you will think that God really must not love and care for you. Such thinking often leads to those inner questions and resentments, which begin to foul up your relationship with God. After all, isn't it somewhat His fault that we are this way? He made us as we are. He could have and probably should have done it differently. But He didn't. And then we become critical of our design, and it isn't long before we blame the designer.
This is how our concept of God becomes contaminated and our perception of how He feels about us gets all mixed up, finally ruining our relationship with Him.
Last but not least... low-self esteem sabotages our Christian service. What is the biggest obstacle that prevents members of the body of Christ from functioning harmoniously as parts of the body? What is the first thing people say when you ask them to do something in the body of Christ? "Teach a Sunday school class? I can't stand up in front of people." "Share at the next ladies's meeting, or men's breakfast? Oh, I couldn't do that!" "Go knocking on doors to invite souls to Easter Service? That would scare me to death." "I'm tongue-tied. Public speaking is not my gift, but I can do something else."
Seriously, Christians are not a bunch of superstars. Have you not noticed, God doesn't work with too many superstars in doing His work. Remember Moses... he lost no time in telling the Lord about his stuttering. Mark ... ran out on Paul and Barnabas on a mission trip. Paul was right when he said that not many wise and noble, or many supermen or wonder women, are on God’s team (see 1 Corinthians 1:26-31).
The trouble with low-self esteem, you know what it is? It robs God of marvelous opportunities to show off His power and ability through our weaknesses. Paul said of himself... But He [God] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:9-10)
Why could Paul say his weakness was strength? Because God used whatever his weakness was to show off His strength and power. Paul mastered the ability to appropriate the strength of God in everything he did in his life. You can too, because that same “strength” Paul possessed lives in every committed Christian... the Holy Spirit.
Nothing sabotages the Christian life more than thinking so little of yourself that you never really give God a chance to work His power in you.
We must never forget who we are, what we are and how much God loves us. We must give God a chance to shine his perfection through us.
NEXT WEEK: More on this humanist idea of “low self-esteem.”
