In a day when self-esteem has been raised almost to the level of religious worship, it’s hard to keep a sense of balance. There are times when you feel less than a worm. You lose your job at the very time in life that you expected things to be going well for you. The company called it "down-sizing" but you call it "lousy luck"! At the very time you expected to sit back and put your tired feet on the desk, the boss orders you to clear out your desk drawers and you are history with that company.
In the past decade you’ve heard that knowing who you are–having a healthy sense of self-esteem–is the key to preventing juvenile delinquency, getting a handle on job advancement, and generally feeling good about life. On the other hand, there is the "worm mentality", the position that says the importance of self-esteem has been grossly exaggerated.
You are caught in the middle, not knowing what to think. You just know that you hurt, and that you feel pretty worthless, incapable of breaking out of the depression that has taken you captive. Instead of getting up in the morning with a "let’s go out there and get ’em" mentality, you wake up wanting to stay in bed or crawl into the nearest hole.
To understand how God views your life, and how you should view it as well, you’ve got to go back to what happened on Good Friday outside the city of Jerusalem. You remember, of course, that on that infamous day Jesus was crucified at the hands of Roman soldiers. But the issue involves the questions, Why? Why was He there? And did His being there have anything to do with my worth as a person?
The only reason God allowed Jesus to come to earth and die was that God the Father considered you to be a person worth saving. He made you in His own image, but sin took you away from the kind of relationship which God intended for you to have with Him. The Cross is the balance between the overly inflated opinion that some have of themselves and the "worm mentality" that says you are less than nothing.
I concede that my old sinful nature destroyed the image of God in my life, but I also recognize that being spiritually reborn makes me a child of the Father and lets me know I am not an orphan in the world.
Knowing that all of us, as God’s children, go through trials, time of testing and sometimes dark valleys, helps me to realize I am not a worm but a son. And because I am a son I can trust the promises of the Father to walk with me and sustain me.
There are times when you’ve got to tell your emotions where to get off, and refuse to believe what your feelings tell you. That’s how you move from uncertainty to faith.
Resource Reading: Romans 7:21-8:4