Views and Value

The past few days God has really been speaking to me about the importance of seeing yourself the way God made you. I thought it would be an important topic to talk about because it is a very difficult thing for all of us to do.

You see everyone in this world has struggled, and most people still do every day, with feelings of worthlessness.  It's easy for us to believe Satan when he tells us we are useless because without God we are useless. But with God we are worth everything. More than gold, treasure and the most precious jewels.

 Humans were never created to live without God inside of them. Every person has a hole in their life that only God can fill. We try to fill that hole and find our purpose in things other than God, but other things were not made to do that. As this quote highlights...

Every person or thing that we trust will eventually fail us, accept Jesus. Only He can bear the full weight of our hope
- John Piper

Our insecurity, obsession with how we look, the shame we feel when we don't look like the earthly standard, and the way we put all our worth in our looks can all be traced back to Adam and eve. It is one of the very first evils introduced to the world. God wanted to keep it from us because he knew how harmful it would be for us. But we sinned and now are ashamed of our bodies. It is built into our nature we worry about what others think and tweak our appearance hoping to make that feeling of shame and inadequacy go away. But the only thing that can truly make it go away is God, because there isn't really anything wrong with us. Think about it. When Adam and eve ate the fruit and were ashamed nothing about their appearance had changed, simply their perception had. So in the same way, we now need to change the way we perceive ourselves. When we use the world's lenses to view ourselves we will always come up short. The world's standards are arbitrary and constantly changing. But when we look at how God sees us and let that frame how we view ourselves we see ourselves as loved creations of an all-powerful creator. Knowing this, we can realize our value is not dependent on anything we do. We have the freedom to be ourselves knowing our value is not going to disappear with changing fads and trends. It gives us a peace and security in who we are while giving us the freedom to grow and change to be better as we strive towards the one who gives us our value.