"You'll Never Amount to Anything"

How's that for a picker upper?  Not much for winning friends and influencing people as Dale Carnegie would say.  Sounds something more along the lines of kicking you when you're already down.  A friend put off by the Church and their unreasoning attitude in some areas recently told me :

I don't need anyone beating me up about my struggles, I do well enough on my own. What I'm looking for is a gentle church where we go and praise God, and the pastor is honest about his own transgressions

I also don't want to hear about what's wrong over and over again. Tell me what's right. I have been pretty good at finding wrong

We've all heard these messages spoken and unspoken about how horrible we are and worthless.

Daily, minute by minute we hear messages from those around us, or from our own negative self talk, explicitly and implicitly.  We take far too many of them to heart in spiritual agreement with the enemy of our souls.  We are told these hurtful lies like the title of this blog by a typically angry world of people whose main goal is to drag you down to wallow in the mire with them.  Misery loves company as the saying goes.

I picked this thread up a couple days ago in reaction to a Charles Stanley devotional reading.  The title of the reading is Valued by God from February 5 of his "God's Way Day by Day" devotional reader.  Yeah I'm a few days behind, so what?  It's still good stuff.

The reading opens with Ephesians 2:10:

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

I'm good so far.

Then Charles goes on to write the following:

I have met a number of people through the years who have been told from their childhood, "You'll never amount to anything."  What a terrible message regarding a person's worthiness or value.

The truth of God is what that person needs to hear!  God says you do amount to something.  You are so valuable that God desires to live with you forever.  He desires to transform your sin nature into the very nature of Jesus Christ.  He has a plan and purpose for your life, and He desires to help you fulfill that plan and purpose by giving you the Holy Spirit.

That's when I look back at the verse and wonder whether we can truly make that context apply to everyone for the sake of their self esteem.  My initial thoughts are running along the lines of:  Paul is writing this letter to the Ephesians and verse 10 follows 8 and 9 which are among the best known and most memorized verses about Salvation - so has Dr. Stanley stepped out a touch further than he should have here?

It took me a few days to make searching the context happen.  I mean don't get me wrong, I love everything I've read by Charles Stanley over the years, but alarm bells ring in my mind when anyone touches on self esteem issues.  Because so often self esteem is about SELF.  Exalting humanity to a throne that is not in submission to a power greater than themselves.  Telling someone that they're okay, even if they aren't.  Telling them that whatever they want to do is all right, even when it's not.  Telling them that all roads lead to God, which they don't.  Yes, sincere seekers will always find the right road, but no, all roads do not lead to eternal bliss or reconciliation with our eternal Creator.  So no one gets a pass with me on a statement about self esteem issues, no one.  The lies are so subtle and they sound soooo good that we're inclined to swallow them hook, line, and sinker.  Only to find that we've been caught and reeled in to our death on the enemy of our soul's table.  I'm not into death these days, not for anyone.  Even my pro-gun, pro - 2nd Amendment stance is about life (the defense of innocent life), which is another conversation for another time.

So here's where I landed this morning after starting in Ephesians 1 and reading carefully through 2:13.  Charles Stanley is right, even in regards to non-believers.  We were knit together in our mother's womb.  We breathe the very breath of life breathed into our nostrils from the Creator of all life.  We're created in His image, for all that that means when we say it; and for more than we understand when we say it.

We can't say we truly believe these other things about God and then say someone is worthless.  Now the honest objective evaluation of their life course and decisions may lead us right up to that conclusion, but calling them 'worthless' is not the "right judgment" that Jesus instructs us to make.  Read that last phrase again.  Yes Jesus tells us to "judge not lest ye be judged" but He also tells us to "make a righteous judgment" (work through Matthew 7:1 and John 7:24 for yourselves and you'll come out with a different perspective on the whole judgment thing - throw in Proverbs 20:11 for good measure).  So we're left instead with the conclusion that they do have worth and value, and that they've chosen not to walk in fullness of life.  How do we help them, or at least encourage them to walk in abundance, in fullness of who they were created to be?  There are as many answers to that as there are people on the earth - and not all of the answers look like intuitively kind answers because they involve discipline and consequences.  But understanding that people are worth it, that they have an inherent worth whether we like them or not - that's the good stuff.

That's a perspective changer for how we deal with others in sincere love.  Their value is rooted in their creation by a loving Creator and we can't possibly say we love Him if we can't find it in ourselves to love them.