I had a message on my blog from a man, just the other day, who’s been through bankruptcy. He and his wife had a taxi cab business in New Zealand and it just didn’t go that well. Anybody who knows anything about driving taxis knows that it’s very long hours just to get a reasonable return. It can be tough.

Anyhow this man couldn’t make a go of it despite all the long hours. Let me ask you something, do you enjoy failure? No, me neither. So let me ask you then, how do you get on in the face of failure. When something like that, something that you’ve worked really hard at in life, you’ve poured out all your energies into it and it goes belly up and people look at you and it’s as though someone has stamped the word “failure” across your forehead in big red upper case letters.

And it doesn’t seem to matter how hard you scrub you just can’t get rid of that sense of failure plastered all over you. See it’s things like that, that shape our self-image and when it comes to the making of our self-image one failure seems to outweigh more than a hundred successes.

Have you ever noticed how that works? That’s why relying on successes and failures, on our comparisons between ourselves and other people and what we think other people think of us, on the images of success that the advertising industry tells us we should aspire too that seem forever out of our grasp. That’s why relying on all of that stuff out there is so incredibly dangerous because none of it is accurate. None of that really tells us who we are, and what we’re worth.

Looking out there to find our self-worth and shaping our self-image based on all that palaver out there is a little bit like looking at yourself in one of those distorted mirrors down at the local amusement park, something we talked about on the program I think a few weeks back.

Believing the wrong things about yourself is simply no way to live your life, is it? The question is though, where do you start to get an accurate picture of who you really are, the good, the bad and the ugly? Where do you turn to get an objective yet incredibly loving assessment of yourself on which to base your self-image? How you see yourself, where you fit in, what you were made to be and to do.

There’s nothing more wonderful, let me tell you, than feeling secure in your own skin and enjoying who you are and in fact being totally relaxed and totally comfortable and even delighted with who you’re not. It’s just a stunning feeling to have twenty-four x seven for the rest of your life, really, and it’s a feeling I’ve only had for less than half of my time here on this earth so far.

That doesn’t mean that any of us is going to be perfect but to be secure in who we are, to see yourself for who you truly are and to be totally at peace with that is simply awesome. So today and for the remainder of this series I want to share with you how to go from “insecure” to “secure” because I used to be an incredibly insecure person.

Always trying to please other people, always worried about what others thought of me, trying to impress them, secretly feeling like a charlatan on the inside because of all my failures and limitations that I knew about that I was trying to hide. Does any of that sound just vaguely familiar?

Most months I write a booklet to go along with each of these new series. This month the booklet is called How To Receive A Whole New Self-Image and I’ll share with you in a couple of minutes how you can request your free copy of this latest ten-chapter book but because I’m a visual person one of the first things I always do when I’m planning a new series and a new booklet or a book is to choose the cover image for the book. It’s something I always do myself because it’s an integral part of the creative process for me of putting together a new series of messages like this.

So if you request your free book you’ll see that the image is that of an apple reflected in a mirror. Well, not so much an apple as an apple core with the flesh eaten off. Isn’t that so often how we perceive ourselves? All chewed up, all worn out, all worthless by comparison to the rest of the world.

But how does God see us? Well, that’s the second part of the image that I chose because the reflection of the apple core in the mirror is that of a full, green, healthy, shiny apple. Whole and complete, a perfect specimen and that to me so powerfully depicts the difference between how we perceive ourselves and how God sees us.

See there’s something special that you and I need to know about ourselves to move on from a distorted self-image to the real one, the true one and that’s this. That you and I are hand-crafted in the very image of God, the imago Dei and that always, always was God’s intent. Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 and 27 says:

“Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind, cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind and it was so and God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps along the ground of every kind and God saw that it was good.”

“But then God said, ‘let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle and over the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created human kind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”

And you see, there’s your starting point because that’s how God sees you, not as a chewed out old apple core but as a perfect specimen made in His image, the apple of His eye.

Now have you made some mistakes along the way? Of course you have. Are you chewed out to some extent? Well yeah, probably. Are you forensically perfect in this moment? No, but God sees the potential for you to be and that, that’s why He sent Jesus so that through Jesus you could be forgiven and restored back into this perfect image in which you were created, the very image of God. That’s the starting point and that’s the ending point and that’s what Jesus is all about, restoring you back to the original image, the very image of God.

That’s not some fairy story, that’s THE story. It’s the story that God has had for you and for your life from the very beginning of time, before the beginning of time. He always, always knew that you and I would be imperfect, He always knew that you and I would reject Him and He always, always knew that He was going to send Jesus to die on that cross for you and for me so that we could be forgiven and restored back into His image, the imago Dei.

And do you know what God says in the very next breath after “male and female he created them”? He says this in verse 28:

“God blessed them and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.”

Made in God’s image in order to be what? Blessed. That’s you! That’s His plan for you! Do you know what the one profound difference is between the image that God has of you and the image the world reflects back at you? His image is the image of love whereas the world’s image is the image of criticism, of putting you down, of making you feel worthless.

When the world looks at you more often than not it sees an opportunity to make use of you but when God looks at you the way a father or a mother gazes at their child, He sees someone He’s made in His image to love and to bless and sure He sees the chewed out bits, the blemishes but He looks at them not with criticism but with love. What He sees is the potential to restore you back to that original image, His image. God looks at you and He sees your potential, He sees all that’s possible and that’s why He sent Jesus for you.

The whole point of what we’ve been chatting about so far in this series of messages that I’ve called So … How’s Your Self Image Looking, is that we can make two equal and opposite mistakes in life when it comes to how we see ourselves and where we think we fit in, in the scheme of things.

See some people suffer terribly from low self-esteem, “Oh I’m worthless; I’m not good at anything; I’ll never fit in; there’s no hope for me; life is just one big long blah”. Plenty of people are living like that whether they realise it or not and that self-image clouds their whole life, it robs them of joy in anything and everything.

At the very opposite end of that scale is pride, hubris, that sense of superiority where no one is as good as me, I have to tell you. That’s just as destructive because it robs you of just as many things as low self-esteem does. And in fact, for much of my life I had a touch of both, I covered up my deep insecurities by putting on a front of bravado and self-confidence that had a lot of people fooled – or maybe not.

There’s good self-confidence and there’s bad self-confidence isn’t there? Good self-confidence is a quiet, humble confidence in who you are with a genuine acceptance of who you aren’t, your own limitations. That’s good. Being around people who are like that is in fact a lot of fun but bad self-confidence, well we know all about that too don’t we? People who just roll over the top of others.

How do you get all of this right? Let’s say God created you to be the person that you are and in fact the person who you aren’t as well, if that makes sense. And let’s say, like many people, you haven’t really figured out a healthy self-image for yourself yet, one that makes you really happy with who it is that God made you to be and not to be.

So where do you begin, where do you get that sort of self-image? Well, yesterday on the program we were chatting about the fact that instead of letting the world squeeze you into its mould, the one that will forever leave you with a distorted image of your self-worth, instead of that do something else. Let’s have another listen to it, Romans chapter 12, verses 1 to 8. This is the Apostle Paul writing to the Church in Rome and again I’m reading from the J B Phillips translation. Paul says this:

“Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould but let God remould your mind from within so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity. As your spiritual leader I give you this piece of advice to each one of you, don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself or of your importance but try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given to you all.”

“For just as you have many members in one physical body and all those members differ in their function so we, though many in number, compose one body in Christ and are all members of one another. Through the grace of God we have different gifts, if our gift is preaching let us preach to the limit of our vision, if it’s serving others then let us consecrate ourselves onto service.”

“If it’s teaching let us give all we have to our teaching and if our gift be stimulating the faith of others let us set ourselves to it, let the man who is called to give, give freely, let the man who wields authority think of his responsibility and let the man who feels sympathy for his fellows act cheerfully.”

So there it is, “don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself”, don’t think of yourself more highly than you should but instead have a sane, rational estimate of your capabilities in the light of what? … in the light of the faith that Gods given you. That’s good advice; the question is, “How do you do that?” And Paul immediately goes on to tell us how.

He says, look, we’re all parts of the one body with different gifts, different functions just as the different parts of your body, your eyes and your nose and your pancreas, just as they all have different functions so those who believe in Jesus are the same. We also have different functions, we’re made differently so, Romans chapter 12, verse 6:

“Having gifts that differ according to the grace that’s given to us, let us use them.”

The exciting thing about this is that right here God’s telling us through the Apostle Paul how to get this thing right. It’s the link between the theory and the practice. God’s given you this gift, now use it in the context of God’s family in which He has placed you. That’s why being part of the body of Christ, part of the Church isn’t some optional extra, it’s vitally important because it’s in the context of God’s community that we get to find out who we are, what we were made to do and sometimes by trial and error what we weren’t made to do.

I said at the beginning of today’s message that there’s something remarkable about you that you need to know and that remarkable thing is this, the moment you believe in Jesus you’re part of Gods family. You’re not your own, you’re part of the community, that body of Christ through which Christ lives out His love into this lost and hurting world.

Don’t have a wrong self-image, says Paul, instead start using your natural God-given talents as part of the body of Christ and if you’re a nose be happy being a nose, if you’re an ear be happy with that, be the greatest nose ever, be the best ear ever, be a great pancreas, do you get it?

If you’re a great concert pianist let’s say that means nothing if you’re playing to an empty theatre doesn’t it? Play to a full theatre, take your God-given gift and be a blessing to others, let God’s blessing flow through your gift into the lives of the people around you because they need what you have, they need who you are, they can’t do what you can do, they can’t be who you can be. Who you are and what you can do is God’s gift to them through you.

And as you get on and enjoy being a nose or an ear or a pancreas or whatever you happen to be in the body of Christ, your sense of self-image, your sense of self-worth will become completely and radically transformed. That’s what God is saying to you and to me through this passage today.

This whole remarkable thing about you and me when we believe in Jesus, being part of Christ’s body, discovering our self-worth so we can have the right self-image, this stuff is plastered all over Gods Word. 1 John, chapter 3, verse 1:

“See what love the father has given us that we should be called children of God and that’s what we are. The reason the world doesn’t know us is that it didn’t know Him.”

It’s something remarkable and wonderful that God does for us out of His great love, to make us His children and put us in His family to discover our true identity:

“But when the fullness of time had come God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law in order to redeem those who are under the law so that they might receive the spirit of adoption as children and because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into your heart’s crying ‘Abba, Father’ so that you are no longer a slave but a child and if a child then also an heir through God.” (Galatians chapter 4, verse 4 and 5)

See you’re a child of the living God, that’s suppose to be something to make your heart cry out to Him, that’s something for us to delight in, to rejoice in, being part of His family. Think about it, families were always designed for children to discover themselves in a safe environment and then grow into who they already were.

If you’re looking for your identity, if you’re trying to get a handle on your real image, your true value, the place that you do that is in God’s family. Will it be easy? Will it be perfect? Will every day be a bright, warm, sunny day? Come on, families are never like that, they were never meant to be like that but they are a place where your self-esteem will find it’s right level. That’s God’s plan.

People don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to be an incredibly insecure person, I mean terribly insecure, chronically insecure, all of the time. Concerned about what people were thinking of me and how they saw me and what they thought of what I’d said, I mean what if my voice sounded funny to them, it did when I listened to it from a recording. What if they didn’t like the fact that I was grossly overweight? And I used to be a very big boy. What if they thought what I was saying was downright stupid?

Those were all the doubts bouncing around in my head and my heart and I’ve got to tell you, it’s a terrible way to live your life. Anybody who has experienced that feeling of insecurity or is still living in that place is right at the moment is right now nodding their heads because they know, you know, exactly what I’m talking about.

But the reason people would never have believed that I of all people was suffering from chronic deep-rooted insecurity was, that has I said the other day, I was able to put on a very convincing facade of confidence. I’m a fairly strong character, I’m reasonably articulate and I find it very quick and easy to collect my thoughts and to express them coherently. So you combine those two abilities, those natural gifts, and you can see how easy it was for me to build that over-confident facade.

Of course it didn’t fool mature people, wise people. You can always tell when it’s an act, when you have to keep promoting yourself and telling other people how good you are, lots of people will see through that. Others are intimidated by that, they back off although they never love you and respect you for it.

The reason that I’m being so blatantly transparent here is that I don’t want you to think for one moment just because I’m this smooth voice on the radio, that I’ve had a perfect life. I am talking about overcoming insecurity here as a first hand practitioner not a theoretician. That’s my point.

Today it’s entirely different for me, completely. When something happens that would have in the past have caused me to feel insecure, criticism for instance or that feeling of inadequacy when I compared myself with other people, or perhaps someone knows more about a particular subject than I do, when those things happen these days I’m just completely at ease, there’s not a single twinge of insecurity that swoops through me.

This one single transformation in my life is one of the things that I’m most thankful to Jesus for. And right now I want to tell you how it happened because it was all about what He did for me not about what I did for myself, please understand that, it’s all about Jesus.

You hear about people who have emotional problems like this going to see a therapist or they go into therapy, we sometimes hear it said. And there’s a role for counselling and therapy but my therapy came in the form of rehabilitation that was fed to me directly from God’s Word.

The single most powerful most incredibly mind-blowing transformation that I’ve ever experienced in my life has come from quietly, every day, reading God’s Word. Praying about it, thinking about it and then letting the Holy Spirit write it on my heart so that I can live it out.

That’s how therapy becomes rehabilitation; the word becomes deed because that’s what God does. You start by crawling then by limping then you slowly graduate to walking and one day you find yourself running. It’s how God seems to work. Yeah, okay, there’s the odd lightning bolt out of the sky that zaps you with power but there are also weeks and months and years of quietly just living out Gods’ Word as a form of powerful rehabilitation.

So, what part of God’s Word impacted me and set me free from the deep insecurities that I’d lived with all my life? Well, here it is. It follows on where we left off yesterday where we were talking about living out the unique gift that God’s given each one of us. Romans chapter 12, verses 9 to 21. Just quietly drink this passage of Scripture in and let the Holy Spirit have a powerful effect in you as He speaks into your heart.

“Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Don’t lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord, rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints, extend hospitality to strangers.”

“Bless those who persecute you, bless and don’t curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, live in harmony with one another. Don’t be haughty but associate with the lowly, don’t claim to be wiser than you are, don’t repay anyone evil for evil but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.”

“If it’s at all possible, as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved never avenge yourselves but leave room for the wrath of God for its written ‘vengeance is mine, I will repay’ says the Lord. No, if your enemies are hungry feed them, if they’re thirsty give them something to drink for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good.”

Do you see how there’s nothing spectacular here? God’s just quietly talking about humbly using your special God-given gift and the ability to bless others and going and doing it. Nothing spectacular, just quietly day after day after day, in all different ways of doing that. Outdo each other in showing honour, be patient through suffering, keep on persevering in prayer, generously contribute, hospitality to strangers, the list goes on.

Day after day, it’s so simple, it’s too simple, it’s too obvious and yet what happens is that as we exercise our gifts over and over and over again to bless others, just by doing good like we just read here, the Holy Spirit flows out through us, the blessing of God flows out through us and as well as blessing all those other people out there God blesses us by validating who we are, who He made us to be, what He made us to do and the stuff we’re good at.

He validates that as we use His gifts He’s given us in action. He uses us; He works through us. You see there’s the rehab, there’s the transformation, right there and there is a whole new sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-image being rebuilt from the ground up by God.

Isn’t that just beautiful? Isn’t that completely wonderful? Do you see how God’s Word here powerfully translates into simple actions that bless others and transforms us. See only God can do that, only when we accept Jesus into our lives and God’s forgiveness flows and the Holy Spirit’s power flows can that transformation take place.

I feel like I’m jumping out of my skin at the moment at the sheer privilege to be able to share this beautiful truth with you today. The wonder of God’s plan for your life, do you have any idea how much He loves you? Do you have any idea how great God’s plans are for you?

God doesn’t want you to live in chronic insecurity. God doesn’t want you to suffer from pride or from low self-esteem or as I did both at the same time, God wants to set you free from all of that. To humbly yet powerfully live out the life of blessings that He has planned for you.

Yes, through a whole bunch of trials and temptations that will come your way. I mean the devil is not going to leave you alone when you start living out this life, be sure of that. In fact the mere fact that he comes after you with his legions of demons is a sure sign that you are on the right path.

Your God wants you to know that the image in which He created you is His image and the hash that you’ve made of things, through your sins, is wiped away through your faith in the fact that Jesus paid the price for you on that Cross and that His power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in you now to restore you back into that original image. And the more you see that image appear in you the more you’re going to delight in who He made you to be and the more that deep insecurity is going to flee from you – trust me, I know.