Self esteem

The libraries and bookstores are full of texts telling us about self-esteem. If they are right, then self-esteem should be one of our highest aspirations. When was the last time you heard some expert say, ” Always remember that you are a tiny, almost insignificant blemish on the face of the universe.” Sounds silly doesn’t it?

But, in fact, we revel in our self-esteem. Comparing ourselves to our fellow man and promoting ourselves among our peers is in our nature. And self promotion is not necessarily a bad thing…….in its place. The problem is that there is a place where self-esteem is destructive. That place is in our relationship with God, our creator. God lives and operates on an entirely different plane. When we inflate our self-esteem to the point where we are co-equals with God…….or worse…….when we assign ourselves the position of supervisor of God, we commit a grave error. This is the world of the secular humanist. This is the world of the atheist and the agnostic. Unfortunately, I frequently hear Christians taking issue with some point of teaching from the Bible……from God:

Jesus was a nice man…….no more.
Hell is just a metaphor
All faiths lead to God
Fear God means respect God……not fear God
God used Darwin to build his creation
Your sexual identity is a personal choice.

What is going on here is that we have allowed our self-esteem to grow to the point where we listen to God and then apply our intellect to decide if God is right. In practice, we give ourselves veto power over the word of God.

If we are honest, it gets even worse. Because, we don’t limit our oversight of God to our intellect. We also apply our appetites. Show me a Christian who rejects a part of God’s teaching, and I will show you a Christian who wants to do something that God has clearly told him not to do. The Christian who does this has a mantra that I often hear.

“But, I’m a good person”

And that is usually true……..as far as it goes. But we are also “bad people”. Every one of us. From Billy Graham to Adolf Hitler, every one of us has a thread of evil. This is where self-esteem goes off the tracks. We become so fixed on our goodness that we deny our evil. This leads to the fatal failure of many Christians…….the belief that “I am good enough” to earn paradise.

Let me be clear.

I am not “good enough”…….and neither are you.

The moral here is humility. How can I, a created being with a streak of evil running through me, pass judgment on my creator, my God, who is by definition perfect? There are only two ways to pull this trick off:

Inflate my self-esteem to the point where I can effectively oversee God.

Denigrate God until he is more flawed than me.

Both of these intellectual exercises are dishonest. Both are wrong. Even worse, both are profoundly self-destructive.

But, that is where a huge segment of our culture is today.

A highly inflated self-esteem may be holding you back from a properly formed relationship with your creator.

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

God, speaking to Solomon, 2 Chronicles, 7:14,ESV

As Christians we are told…….we are expected…….to pray. We pray prayers of praise. We pray prayers of petition. It is not surprising that the bulk of our prayers of petition are for the benefit of ourselves, our family, and our friends. This is human nature. Put out the fire that is closest to you…….then worry about the fire that is further away.

In my Bible reading today, we are taught to pray for kings. There aren’t a lot of kings around today. They have been replaced by presidents, prime ministers, senators, and representatives. I think that it is fair to conclude that we are expected to pray for the political leaders in our world. This is where it gets sticky.

Some of the world’s leaders agree with me….with you…..with us. Some of the world’s leaders disagree with me….with you….with us. Some of the leaders in the political realm are good……some are simply evil. Most of them……like us…..fall somewhere in between. Current political thought is that we should hate the leaders who disagree with us. We are taught by our leaders to demonize anyone who disagrees with them. Donald Trump recently gave a speech where he proudly said that he hates his opponents. The leadership of the left casually throws out terms like Nazi and Fascist. I hear talk like this every day from people who tell me they are Christians.

But, “hate your opponent” and “slander your enemy” are not what the Bible teaches. That is not what Jesus taught. Both Trump and the left, while many of them identify as Christians, have clearly missed the point.

Jesus and the Bible are crystal clear on this topic.

We are told in no uncertain terms to pray for the leaders of governments. We are told in no uncertain terms to pray for our enemies.

Christian conservatives are told in no uncertain terms to pray for:

 AOC
 Schumer 
 Maxine Waters
 CNN

Christian liberals are told in no uncertain terms to pray for:

 Trump
 JD Vance
 Charlie Kirk
 Fox

Both parties are told to pray for:

 Putin
 Xi
 Hamas
 Netanyahu 

I think that you get the point. But, how do we pray for people with whom we disagree? How do we pray for people who are evil?

We can pray for wisdom.
We can pray that they will turn to Jesus.
We can pray for repentance and healing.

In short…….we can pray that they will hear Jesus……and respond.

We can pray that they will turn to God and align themselves with him……..not with us…….not with our favorite politician “du jour”.

Can you imagine a world where all of the “kings” consistently followed Jesus?

Instead of you and me.

That’s a prayer worth praying.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers,[a] what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Jesus in Matthew. 5: 43-48, ESV

Ruth is my favorite book in the Old Testament. It is unlike any other book in the Bible. Chapter 3 is my favorite chapter in Ruth. What is so different about Ruth and why do I like it so much?

At its heart. Ruth is a love story. It is all about faith, obedience, generosity, grace, and especially redemption. Ruth is an outlier. It is just different from the rest of the Bible. The most important fact in the New Testament is the Gospel of Jesus. Much of the Bible is historical……who did what and when. Much of the Bible is guidelines to living a righteous life…….rules. All of this is good and terribly important.

And then there is Ruth.

So, why is Ruth so important…….so different?

Ruth is important because it tells us why.

Ruth tells us why God did it all.

Here is the condensed version of Ruth. Ruth was a refugee, illegal, undocumented. She was a widow. She was destitue. She followed her mother-in-law to an alien land because she loved her and because she had nowhere else to go. She hoped to build a better life in an far away place. While there, without permission, she gathered scraps of food in the field of Boaz, a righteous man. One night, while Boaz was sleeping, she crawled under his blanket. He awoke and found her there. She asked him for his care and protection. And Boaz did just that. He used his resources to support Ruth and her family. Then, he bought, redeemed, and married Ruth. She became a great-grandmother of David……and ultimately…….of Jesus. Ruth was destitute; but, she was brave, bold, even audacious. Boaz was rich; but, he was kind, righteous, and generous. Both of them were remarkable human beings.

Ruth was a refugee. She had nothing material to offer. All she had was the woman that she was…..kind, loyal, loving. Boaz was rich and powerful. He paid for Ruth. He protected her. He loved her. All he got from Ruth was their relationship. And that was all he was after from the moment she crawled under his blanket…….from the moment she asked for his protection.

In her audacity, Ruth traveled to a foreign land and sought out a powerful protector. She had nothing to offer except herself. She had nothing to offer but relationship. Her protector, her redeemer, rescued her at a significant cost to himself. He did it because he, too, wanted a relationship. Ruth did not earn Boaz, she did not deserve Boaz. Ruth did not earn redemption. The redeemtion of Ruth was an act of grace…….by Boaz.

Any of this sound familiar?

The story of Boaz and Ruth is the story of Jesus and of me, and of you. We are destitute. We live in a broken culture and we seek safety in Jesus. We crawl under his cover and ask for protection…….for redemption……for a future. And Jesus pours redemption and blessing over us. We didn’t pay for it. We didn’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. It was and is an act of grace

All we can offer is relationship.

That is all Jesus wants from us.

But it goes even deeper.

I am not only destitute and in need of redemption. As it turns out, I too am refugee, a foreigner, an alien………… an illegal. I come from a harsh, hostile culture. I flee and search for a safe place. I have nothing material to offer. So, I find a kind powerful man in Jesus. I crawl under his cover and ask for protection……..for redemption……..for grace.

Am I really any different from the “illegal” at our southern border?

All I can offer………is relationship.

But, just like Ruth, that is enough. Relationship is what my redeemer wants from me.

At midnight the man was startled and turned over, and behold, a woman lay at his feet! He said, “Who are you?” And she answered, “I am Ruth, your servant. Spread your wings over your servant, for you are a redeemer.” And he said, “May you be blessed by the Lord, my daughter.

Ruth 4: 8-10,ESV

Isn’t that what most parents want? We want our children to grow, to succeed, to thrive. We want them to be happy……all day…..every day. We are proud of them when they succeed. We are proud of ourselves when they succeed. We brag about our children when they succeed. My father was proud of me and wanted me to take over the family business. My mother was proud of my achievements. She repeatedly asked me how much money I made. This was the metric she used to measure my success…….and, indirectly, her success. For most of my life I have used my mother’s success scale. I suspect that most parents do: a good high paying job, a stable career, recognition by our peers, a good wife, a suburban house with a white picket fence.

By my mother’s calculation, my children were abject failures. Two of my sons died in their 20’s. The third is in prison. Ask a hundred observers to score the sucess of my family and we would not do very well.

But, are we using the right metric? Was I using the correct yardstick to measure the success of my children?

I think not.

I’m not kidding myself. My sons took a long tortous route to get to where they are now. They did not score well on my mother’s scale. I remember sitting in my house one Christmas eve with a Boone County deputy discussing how to deal with a smashed mailbox. I remember posting bail on multiple occasions. I didn’t tell my mother. Only recently, have I realized that my mother was using the wrong scale. So was I.

The Bible offers us some guidance. You probably guessed that corporate position, community adulation, and net worth are not part of God’s metric for a successful life.

The Bible teaches that success is defined by spending eternity with our creator…….God…….who loves us and wants us to succeed even more than our parents. How do we go about acheiving that?

The guidance from the Old Testament:

“What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Micah 6:8, ESV

The guidance from the New Testament:

Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

Jesus explaining eternity, John, 3:36, ESV

This changes everything. My mother’s metric for success was worldly and temporal. It applies, but only to the brief period of our physical life. God’s metric, like God, is eternal. It applies to both our temporal physical life and to our eternal spiritual life.

My mother wasn’t wrong. But, neither is God.

Both metrics are valid. The key point is in understanding their period of validity. My mother’s metric works during our physical life; but, becomes completely irrelevant at death. God’s metric is eternal. You can follow or reject my mother’s metric. The consequences are extremely limited.

But, if you reject God’s metric, the consequences are eternal…….and they are catastrophic.

I have no doubt that my mother would have called my sons a disappointment. They did follow a pretty twisted path and to a degree still are. But, in the end, they recognized and accepted Jesus. By God’s metric, my sons were successful.

By God’s metric………I have been a successful parent.

And that is all that counts.