One of the most important, the most profound, the most fundamental influences on our lives is how we see ourselves. And let me say, how we see ourselves, isn’t always that healthy. So … what sort of an impact is that having on your life?

DISTORTED MIRROR SYNDROME

On a fairly regular basis in the various series and programmes that I share with you here on ’Christianityworks’, I touch on things like self-image, low self-esteem, giftings and abilities – that sort of thing. There’s a reason that I keep coming back to that genre of discussion if you will, and that reason is this: I see so many people in this world who are walking around with a distorted view of who they are, and those distortions (fed to them largely by the people in the systems and the economy that surround them) are ruining their lives. So as I was thinking and praying about what we could talk about starting this week, I came to the conclusion that it was time for a whole series on self-image, and so I’ve called it “So … How’s Your Self-Image Looking?”, because the aim I guess is to challenge you about how you see yourself.

If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, you may remember that one of the things he starts off with is how we see the world. He describes it something like this: ‘It’s like we each have a different set of glasses on our face. Maybe yours have a pink tint and mine have a yellow tint and the next person’s have a green tint, and what we see and how we see it depends entirely on those lenses through which we’re looking at the world. Most commonly, people say that “seeing is believing”, but actually no, argues Covey, “believing is seeing”. What you believe profoundly influences what you see.’

A few weeks ago on the programme, I shared the difference between someone who’s secure in themselves and someone who’s insecure. Let’s say you’re insecure. A person comes up to you and shares a constructive, well-meaning piece of criticism with you. None of us likes criticism, but an insecure person is going to react terribly to that. They might get angry; they might be hurt; they might withdraw further into their shell; they might start bad-mouthing the person who criticised them. They’re all the sorts of reactions that an insecure person would have. A secure person on the other hand might initially be annoyed by the criticism, but fairly quickly starts thinking about it, and assessing it as objectively as they can, and if the criticism has some basis to it, they start to do some things to change – to learn from what they’ve just heard; to get better at this thing that maybe they’ve botched up the last time round.

Do you see how believing is seeing? How the lenses through which we perceive the world profoundly impact what we see and what we feel and how we react? And let me ask you: In this one small example of handling criticism, which person ends up being better off for the experience, the secure one, or the insecure one? That’s pretty obvious, right? That’s why I said at the beginning of the programme that how we see ourselves is one of the most important, the most profound, the most fundamental influences on our lives. And it’s an influence either for good or for bad; for liberation or for bondage; for building an amazing future, or for living a rotten life. That’s not hyperbole. I’m not overstating the case here at all.

I used to have a terrible self-image of myself. Now let me tell you, it was truly a rotten life. When I was young (and that’s always where it starts, let me tell you), I was short and dumpy and not very good at running and not very good at sports, and in a sports-mad nation like Australia that simply wasn’t a good thing. The other boys used to make fun of me and even when I went and became an officer in the Australian army (a four-year degree course), I was almost kicked out in my final year of officer training for failing the cross-country by just twelve seconds. Other people looked down on me. Forget the fact I had other talents and abilities, my peers considered me to be something less than they were, in fact, considerably less.

Now I caught up with some of these guys recently from the Royal Military College, Duntroon (my classmates). It had been thirty-four years since I’d seen most of them. We were all young men back then, when we were training to be officers. Anyway, we had a great night together, eating and drinking and reminiscing and laughing, and you know, none of them seemed to remember anymore that I was the guy that couldn’t run as fast as them. They’d all moved on, but can you see how these hurts from the past can live on in you and distort your self-image? So many people are carrying round the reproach of the past with them, and they wonder why they’re not having such a great life.

The Bible talks about the reproach of the past, and God is super-keen to remove it from us, because while we’re still carrying it around with us, we simply can’t live the life that He has planned for us. Have a listen to this. Joshua 5:9:

“Then the LORD said to Joshua, ‘Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you’, so that place has been called Gilgal unto this day.”

That was said to Joshua (the new leader of Israel) after Israel had been slaves for several centuries in Egypt. Now they were about to cross over into the land that God had promised to Abraham many, many centuries before, so why did God say this thing about rolling back the reproach from the past? Why did God do that? Because God knew they wouldn’t be able to take hold of the Promised Land, battle by battle, if they were still living in their heads as slaves from Egypt. These people had to see themselves as God’s chosen people (not lowly slaves), in order to fight the battles they would need to fight to take hold of all the blessings of the promised land. So God lifted the reproach of Egypt, that sense of looking back on the past and deciding they weren’t good enough. He lifted that off them, so that they could enter and take and enjoy the Promised Land.

Well, let me tell you this: God wants to lift the reproach of your past off you too, so that you can enter the promises He has for your life, so that you can fight the battles He has for you to fight, and so that you can enjoy the blessings He has for you to enjoy. I know what some people are thinking right now. ‘Nah, my life has failure written all over it. That can never happen to me. I’m always going to be fat and ugly. I’m always going to be not good enough. I’ll never be free from my insecurities.’ Well, that’s simply not what God has to say about you, so let’s start listening to what God actually does have to say about you. Here it is, Isaiah 54:4-5:

“Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed; do not be discouraged, for you will not suffer disgrace. For you will forget the shame of your youth, and the disgrace of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your Husband, the LORD of Hosts is His name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, and the God of the whole earth He is called.”

Maybe you do have failure written all over your life. You’re divorced (maybe once, maybe more than once). You don’t look the way you want to look. You haven’t achieved what you want to achieve. You aren’t perceived the way you want to be perceived. People don’t acknowledge you and praise you the way you want to be acknowledged and praised, so you look at your crummy little life in your crummy little neck of the woods, and you think to yourself: ‘Blah! There’s nothing anybody can do with me; I’m done.’ Well, here’s what I want to leave you with today: God is not done with you. For as long as you have breath, God is not done with you. He won’t be done with you until you’re dead and then, if you believe in Jesus, you’ll enjoy eternal blessing. That’s what this series is all about. It’s called “So … How’s Your Self-Image Looking?” We’re going to discover together from God’s Word how to be free from the reproach of the past, so that you can enter into and live in the life that God has promised for you.

AN ACCURATE PICTURE

I had a message on my blog from a man just the other day who has been through bankruptcy. He and his wife had a taxicab 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 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 success and failures, on our comparisons between ourselves and other people, on what we think other people think of us, on the images of success that the advertising industry tells us we should aspire to but 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’s accurate. None of it 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 through one of those distorted mirrors down at the local amusement park – something we talked about on a programme 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 and 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; than 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 by seven for the rest of your life; really, and it’s a feeling that 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 ever 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’s 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 (or 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.

You see, there’s something special that you and I need to know about ourselves to be able to move on from a distorted self-image to the real one – the true one, and that’s this: That you and I are handcrafted in the very image of God (the imago Dei) and that always, always was God’s intent. Genesis 1:26-27:

“’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 humankind 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, over the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’, so God created humankind 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? 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 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 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.

A FAITH CHOICE

It seems to me that you and I have a significant faith choice to make each and every day when it comes to who or what we believe about our self-image. Way too many people are believing what the world has to say. After all, every time you turn the television on, advertisers are dangling these glossy images of beauty and success under your nose, and they tell you that if you buy their product, this is how it’s going to be for you: successful, beautiful, balanced, happy people fawning over you. But of course, it never happens quite that way, does it? Those images turn out to be a cruel mirage, and so they continue to feed our distorted self-image. They continue to rob us of the true image that God has created in us – His image, and the same is true of how we live our lives, what we actually do with our lives. That’s something we’re going to talk about a whole bunch more next week on the programme, but all too often, we’re trying to do things we were never made to do.

The passage I always come back to in order to get my faith choice right (about believing who I am and what my worth is) is Psalm 139. If you’ve been listening to this programme for any length of time, you’ll be getting to know this passage rather well, ‘cos it’s so important. Have another listen. It’s beautiful (Psalm 139:13-18):

“For it was You, God, who formed my inner parts; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works; that I know very well. My frame wasn’t hidden from You when I was being made in secret, intricately woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance; in Your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are Your thoughts, o God, how vast is the sum of them! I try to count them, but they are more than the sand; I come to the end, and I am still with You.”

In other words, the Psalmist who wrote that is saying to God: “LORD, I am amazed; I’m totally gob-smacked at who I am, who You made me to be. I … God, I just can’t get my mind round it.” Now, let me ask you something: Which one are you going to believe – the Word of God, or the world; the advertising industry, or the Bible? Perhaps you’ve never quite thought about it in those terms, but it’s a stark choice. You know what they say: ‘You are what you eat.’ If you continually swallow the rubbish the world feeds you, if you continually dine on that junk-food emotional diet, and stare into those distorted mirrors believing the distorted image they reflect back at you, your life is going to be a mess. Your sense of self-worth is going to be destroyed.

It follows as surely as night follows day, but (and here’s the big but) if you choose instead to gaze into the Word of God, to listen to His Spirit, to experience His loving arms around you, to live out God’s Word in your life … If you choose to believe what God says about you, and you start living as though it’s true (‘cos it is), then little by little, your self-esteem, your self-worth, your self-image is going to be restored back into the right image – the image of God in which you were created.

So this is what I want to leave you with today: From this moment forward, which one is it going to be? Who are you going to believe? And perhaps to help you answer that question for yourself, you could start with: “What do I want my life to look like? Do I want to be safe and secure in who I am in Christ, or do I want to be insecure and plagued by low self-esteem or pride or both?” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like something of a no-brainer, I would have thought. So please, grab your Bible this week. Start reading it. Start here at Psalm 139, and some of the other Scriptures that we’ve been talking about today, and start hearing and seeing and believing who God says you are, and what plans God has for your life, and the love that He wants to pour out on you, through Jesus Christ His Son.

Some people spend their whole lives trying to sort out their identify – and as a result, they struggle terribly from problems of self–esteem and self–worth. But God has a plan to put you in a place where you can learn firsthand who you are, and what He made you to do.

DON’T BE SQUEEZED

None of us likes wearing clothes that don’t fit particularly well. It’s a horrible feeling isn’t it? That shirt that’s too tight, or that pair of pants, or in the case of women the skirt that sits awkwardly on you. My personal nemesis has always been the stiff collar with a tie in the middle of summer. I tell you, after thirty years of having to wear a tie and a collar, these days I almost never wear them because I hate that feeling of being uncomfortable.

So what happens with these ill-fitting clothes, because you hate wearing them, is that you can’t wait to get home and rip them off and get into something comfortable.

I think we all relate to that, don’t we? And yet, so many people live their lives in something much worse than ill-fitting clothes – they live their lives in a straightjacket. Why? How? Because they’re somehow trying to be someone who they’re not; they’re trying to do something that they were never made to do.

Interesting to look at the history of the proverbial straightjacket. It actually originated in France back in 1790, invented by an upholsterer named Guilleret for a hospital. It was in the time before psychiatric medications were developed and doctors simply didn’t know how to treat mental disorders like schizophrenia or depression or anxiety disorders, according to Wikipedia anyway.

By the time of the American civil war, the mentally ill were often placed into poorhouses, workhouses and prisons, and forced to live with criminals. And again, they were being restrained by straightjackets.

Now, it’s a terrible picture when you think about it, someone suffering from mental anguish, being restrained in something much, much worse than ill-fitting clothes. And not on a rare exception basis, it was the routine approach for the mentally ill, considered to be more humane than chaining them up.

Now, the main point of what we’re chatting about today isn’t to get a complete history of straightjackets. The reason I’m painting that picture is so that you and I can put ourselves in that picture, moving from the ill-fitting clothes that we’ve all experienced and the discomfort that all brings, to the whole idea – the terrible idea – of living even one day, let alone a whole lifetime in a straightjacket.

It’s pretty obvious that we were made, you and I, to be free, to be able to move freely and to think freely and to act freely. And yet, let me come back to it, so many people are living their lives under some oppressive straightjacket regime because they’re trying to be someone they’re not or do something they were never made to do.

I spent over twenty-five years as a consultant in management and IT and so I’ve worked in hundreds of organisations around the world. And the number of people I saw in the banks and the insurance companies and the government departments and the oil companies and all sorts of different enterprises who were so depressed, so dissatisfied with work, made me realise that this is happening on a mass, global scale.

People are being squeezed into a mould they were never meant to fit in. Now I came to know many of these people in these client organisations over the years, and time and time again, what I saw were people who were doing jobs they were never made to do, jobs they just wouldn’t ever be suited to do.

The Bible has this to say about who you are and where you fit, and I’m reading here from the more obscure J.B Phillips translation, because I love the way in which he renders this verse, Romans chapter 12, verse 2:

Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your mind from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, that it meets all of his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.

I’ve had so many people try to do that to me, to squeeze me into another mould. Its like God loves me but they have a plan for my life. My dad, when I was young, wanted me to be a doctor. I wanted to be a lawyer. I’d have been a disaster at both of those, because I hate the sight of blood and I’m not very good with masses of detail that are so important in the legal profession. And over the last twenty years or so, as I’ve preached at churches, several have asked me whether I’d be interested in becoming their pastor, when the truth is, I’m just not pastorally gifted.

Do you know why so many people feel as though they’re failures? It’s because they’re trying to be something and they are trying to do something they were never made to be or to do.

I will never be a great cricketer – I don’t have the hand-eye-ball coordination. I will never be a great basketballer because I’m just too short. In fact, most professions, the vast majority out there, as I look around, I am just not suited to.

So imagine if I chose one of them, and slogged away at it for forty years. What would that do to my self-image? What would that do to my self-esteem? And this, I can tell you, is happening as a mass, global, pandemic.

I was watching the great singer Billy Joel on TV, (by the way, that’s another thing I’d love to be able to do, but I really can’t), and I remembered back to his great song, The Piano Man, that he wrote when he was a poor musician, working in a late night bar somewhere. And you look at a guy like that and you realise – hey, this Billy Joel, there’s someone who has discovered their gig in life. The one thing they were made to do.

God made you to do something, to be someone. It’s a different ‘who’ and a different ‘do’ to anyone else that you know. You’re a unique antique let me tell you, and when you discover your shtick, your gig, your one thing in life that God made for you, it will totally change your ‘self-image’ because all of a sudden you will be able to excel at it.

Just after that bit on not being squeezed into the world’s mould, the Bible goes on to say in Romans chapter 12, verse 6:

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them.

That’s the answer. Be who God made you to be, and for goodness sakes, get out there and do what God made you to do.

SOMETHING REMARKABLE ABOUT 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-Esteem 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.

Some people suffer terribly from low self-esteem. 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 blaaaaah.

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 lot of fun. 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 this right? Let’s say that 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 a self-image?

Well, before the break 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, and 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 re-mould 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 functions, 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 is serving others then let us consecrate ourselves onto service; if it is teaching let us give all we have to our teaching; and if our gift be the stimulating of 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 God has 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 we’re all part 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 and 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 God’s 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 with 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, it 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 me through this passage today.

OVERCOMING INSECURITY

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 said. I mean, what if my voice sounded funny to them, I mean 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 just downright stupid?

Those were all the doubts bouncing around in my head and my heart, and I 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 right at the moment, is right now nodding their heads, because they know, you know, exactly what I’m talking about.

But the reason that people would never have believed that I, of all people, was suffering from chronic, deep-rooted insecurity, as I said earlier, I was able to put on a very convincing façade of confidence.

I’m a fairly strong character and 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 façade.

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. But others are intimidated by it and 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 the smooth voice on the radio, that I’ve had a perfect life. I’m talking about overcoming insecurity here as a first-hand practitioner and not a theoretician. That’s my point.

Today, it’s entirely different for me, completely. When something happens that would 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 completely at ease. There is not a single twinge of insecurity that sweeps through me.

This one single transformation in my life is one of the things that I am 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 have 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 and then you slowly graduate to walking and one day, you find yourself running. That’s how God seems to work. Yes 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 God’s 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 before the break where we were talking about living out the unique gift that God has 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 to 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. Do not 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 do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are. Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’, says the Lord. No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are 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 is nothing spectacular here, God is 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.

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, just, 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, just by what we’ve 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 and what He made us to do and the stuff we are good at. He validates that, as we use His gifts that 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 and self-esteem and 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 transform us? Only God can do that. Only when we accept Jesus into our lives and God’s forgiveness flows, and the Holy Spirit 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 does not want you to live in chronic insecurity. God does not want you to suffer from pride or from low self-esteem or, as I did, from 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’re 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 sin 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 appearing in you, the more you will delight in who He made you to be and the more that deep insecurity is going to flee from you. Trust me. I know.

The world tries to tell us what success and wealth and popularity and beauty and all those things should look like, and by definition therefore, who we should aspire to be. But what if life’s not about those outward measures of success at all?

BODY BEAUTIFUL

Let me start today by letting you in on a little secret, so that you understand where I’m coming from on this whole body-image thing. For most of my adult-life until a few years ago, I hated seeing myself. I hated looking at my face in the mirror, and I hated even more seeing a photo of myself. In fact, as much as possible, I avoided photos. Why? Because I was grossly overweight, and that was something that I was deeply ashamed of. I struggled with my weight all my life, and as someone who pretty much always succeeds at things I turn my hand to, I hated (I mean, I absolutely hated) the fact that I couldn’t succeed at looking good.

It’s a terrible thing, I can tell you, not to want to look at yourself in the mirror. You avoid it studiously, and it eats away at your self-esteem. People would never have guessed it of the apparently bold and confident Berni Dymet, but it was the scourge of my life. Of course, I finally found out what was causing me to be so grossly overweight, and that’s something that I share in a free E-booklet called ‘How I Lost 25 kgs.’ You can download it from the Resources section of our website, ChristianityWorks.com if you’re interested. Thousands already have.

But do you see my point? When I come to talk about body image, I’m speaking as someone who has struggled with the body-image thing for most of his life, so this is not a theory lesson; this is someone whose life has been transformed by Christ speaking here.

Now before we get rocking and rolling to talk about the emotional side of body image, let me say this: What I am not saying is that we shouldn’t worry about our health and our weight. The thing that’s causing gross obesity on a global pandemic scale is our addiction to sugar and processed foods. Get rid of those two things out of your diet, get back to what your grandparents and their parents were eating (yes, including bacon, eggs and all those things), and the weight just comes off. Absolutely, get back to natural whole foods, but weight isn’t the only thing that ruins our sense of body image.

Some people just think they look ugly, ok? Some of us don’t fit the stereotypical images of beauty that we see in the glossy magazines and on television. In fact, the reality is that most of us don’t, right? But that doesn’t stop many people from feeling visually inadequate. Some people have birthmarks or scars, or perhaps you’re shorter than you’d like to be, or taller than you want to be, or you wish your hair was a different colour or those wrinkles would just go away. There’s any number of things that we fret about when it comes to body image, and for many people, it simply ruins their lives. Am I right?

So, where do we go with this? If you’re someone whose body image is ruining their life, do you want to be set free from that (I mean, completely, totally and utterly set free from that)? Then stick with me because that’s what we’re going to be doing right now: Not because I happen to have anything profound to say, but because God does, and first up, this is what He has to say about body-image. Are you ready? This comes from a time when the prophet Samuel was sent by God to find a new king to replace King Saul of Israel, who’d gone off the rails. Have a listen (1 Samuel 16:1-13):

The LORD said to Samuel, ‘How long are you going to grieve Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel, so fill your horn with oil and set out. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for Myself a king among his sons.’ 

So, Samuel did what the LORD commanded and he came to Bethlehem, and sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice. When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the LORD’s anointed is now before me.’

But the LORD said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’

Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel. He said, ‘Neither has the LORD chosen this one.’ 

Then Jesse made Shammah pass by, and he said, ‘Neither has the LORD chosen this one.’

Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The LORD has not chosen any of these.’ Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are all your sons here?’

And he said, ‘There remains yet the youngest son, but he is out keeping the sheep.’

And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and bring him, for we will not sit down until he comes.’

He sent and brought him. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome, and the LORD said, ‘Rise and anoint him, for this is the one.’

Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.

Now that’s a profound story of how God chose David, who turned out to be the greatest king that Israel ever had, and notice that David was the runt of the litter. He was the little one, considered so unlikely that his father didn’t even put him before the prophet. Samuel thought, ‘Oh, number one son. You know – the tall, the good-looking one … That’s the one that’s going to be king’, but God said to the prophet, ‘Do not look upon his outward appearance or on the height of his stature because I have rejected him. For the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.’

Listen to me. God doesn’t give two hoots about your physical stature. That’s the last thing He’s interested in! What He’s interested in is who you are – your heart, and if that’s the most precious thing in God’s sight, isn’t it time to ditch this whole body-image inadequacy thing that you’ve been going on about? Well? What you look like is, by and large, God’s sovereign choice. Other than perhaps your weight and a few cosmetic things, the rest is completely out of your control; what matters is who you are – your sense of humour; your heart; your passions; the gifts God’s given you. If that matters most to God, shouldn’t that be what matters most to you?

DRESS TO IMPRESS

I haven’t had that many job-interviews in my life. In fact, I’ve only really had two of them, but the first one is the one that I remember most. It was a daylong selection board they called it, in front of some generals and colonels who were selecting candidates to train as officers in the Australian army. There were about twenty of us young men there vying for contention, and about six or seven of these senior officers. They spent the whole day putting us through the hoops. There were group-sessions where we were asked questions. We each had to get up and give an impromptu speech. There was an obstacle course that we had to traverse, with problems to solve along the way … All sorts of different things. It was an exhausting day, I can tell you, and the whole time, you were really trying to impress these guys because you wanted to be selected to train as an officer. The pressure was intense.

Out of the twenty of us, just three or four made it through. I happened to be one of them, and then for the next four years at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, we were constantly being assessed. Every time you interacted with one of the military or academic staff, they were assessing you and constantly filling in these pink slips (“OQ9’s”, they were called) that were entered into a computer system. Almost without notice, a fellow officer/cadet would be plucked from a class, and discharged because they hadn’t measured up. We started off with 148 young men in our class, and yet only 61 of us graduated 4 years later – I by the skin of my teeth, because I had failed the cross-country run by a few seconds in my final year.

It seems to be the way of the world, doesn’t it? We’re constantly under the microscope; constantly being assessed and evaluated in the workplace, in social settings, on the sporting fields … It’s almost like we’ve been conditioned to compete, and in a competitive environment, if you want to succeed, you have to impress other people. I remember a publisher telling me that if I wanted to succeed at the book-writing game, I’d have to become a shameless self-promoter. That’s terrible, isn’t it? And self-promotion, having your own PR-machine to tell other people how good you are, seems to be the order of the day. We dress to impress.

But what I’ve discovered is that all this competition makes you insecure, and the shameless self-promotion that many people carry on with is simply a mask behind which they hide in deep insecurity. You’ve been there; I’ve been there, and it’s simply no way to live your life. We’re in the middle of a series of messages called “So … How’s Your Self-Image Looking”, and the reason that we’re chatting about this whole self-promotion thing today is that for many people, it’s white-anting their sense of self.

God actually has something very specific to say on this because He knows that it’s no way to live your life, hiding behind that mask of insecurity. If who you are on the outside is different from who you are on the inside, you end up feeling like you’re being torn apart. You end up feeling that you have to spend your whole life pretending; impressing other people; dancing to their tune; marching to the beat of their drum. You end up feeling like a fraud, with a fear that someone’s going to catch you out – that they’ll discover that really, you aren’t anywhere near as good as they think you are.

I hope you can tell that I’m speaking first-hand here, because this is very much how I lived my life before Jesus set me free. Have a listen to these two Scriptures from God’s Word. 1 Samuel 2:3:

Talk no more so very proudly; let no arrogance come from your mouth, for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed.

And also Proverbs 27:1-2:

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.

What God’s saying is, stop boasting. Stop being so full of yourself, because arrogance is foolish. God is a God of knowledge. He knows what you’re on about. He sees through all of that façade and all that rubbish, and while some people might be intimidated by pride and arrogance, most of them (like God) can see straight through it.

Who cares what you say about how good you are, or what you can do, or what you’ve achieved, or what you’re going to do? Self-praise is pretty much worthless. In fact, it has negative value in most people’s eyes, including in God’s eyes. So much better to just get out there and do good, and let someone else praise you; not your own mouth, a stranger even; not your own lips.

When I was in the army as an officer, each year, we had a formal confidential report written on each one of us. There were two types of officers: Those who set out to impress their superiors so that they’d get a good annual confidential report, and those who just got on and did good and led their soldiers and honoured their seniors, and didn’t think at all about their annual report, and it was the latter (not the former) group that I wanted to follow into battle. It was the latter (not the former) who we spoke well of. You see self-promotion is ugly. It’s ugly on the outside to those who receive it, and it’s ugly on the inside because it feeds a deep insecurity and makes you feel even more insecure.

If you’re someone who constantly worries about what other people think of you, just stop it! Stop it. It ain’t worth it, and you can never please them all. Just get on; do good; honour God. Let the rest take care of itself. Sometimes people will love you; sometimes people will criticise you – who cares? And even more to the point, let God take care of it for you. 1 Peter 5:5-6:

God opposes the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time.

See, the bottom line is this: Self-promotion is nothing; nothing compared to God-promotion. Listen. “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time”! When we humble ourselves, we start to discover a deep security in Christ, and we end up reaping the benefits of His promotion in due time.

STOP COMPARING

Who was it, during your teenaged years that you compared yourself to? Most of us, we had a few people back then to whom we looked as the ideal image. First up, there was probably a peer. If you’re a male, it was another boy; if you’re a female, it was another girl … It was that one person that you wished you could be like then … As good-looking; as well-liked; as smart; as athletic. Whatever it is that you admired about them and the life that they had, it gnawed away at you on the inside that you weren’t as blessed in that department as they were.

If you’re a girl, probably what you envied was that other girl‘s appearance. If you’re a boy, probably what you envied was that other boy’s popularity – the fact that everyone seemed to listen to him. He was the leader of the pack, and you were just … well, you. At another level, there was probably an adult that you wished and dreamed you would grow up to be like. Perhaps it was a movie star, or a sporting star, or somebody famous that you dreamed that one day you’d be like them.

I’m sure all that brings back some memories for you: A few things that you haven’t thought about for a very, very long time, or perhaps you’re still thinking about them. Perhaps you’re still comparing yourself with other people, wondering why it is that you never quite seem to measure up to the ideal person that you see in them. You find yourself comparing your marriage to your best friend’s marriage, thinking: ‘Why can’t my wife or my husband be as passionately in-love with me as they are?’ Or perhaps that other person at work, who seems to be so articulate and well liked. Whenever someone needs something, they always go to that person instead of coming to you.

So why do we do that? What’s the matter with us that we’re constantly comparing ourselves to other people? Well in part, it comes naturally in a sense and to some extent, some comparison isn’t a bad thing. In fact, when you think about it, it’s by comparing ourselves that we learn. We compare ourselves to our parents and we learn from them. We pick up their good habits and sometimes, we pick up their bad habits too.

And when we’re grown-up, I mean, I had a mentor in the workplace for over twenty years – a man called Graham, a couple of decades older than me, and I saw how he operated and the results that he achieved by operating that way, and I modelled myself on him because I liked the results he was getting.

Now that’s not a bad thing at all, but there’s an unhealthy level of comparison that often goes on: when we just want to cherry-pick the good things that other people have in their lives, as though they don’t have any bad things in their lives. Of course that’s completely unrealistic because when we cherry-pick the good things and ignore the bad things, what we’re going to do is we’re going to construct an ideal image that we aspire to, which is totally unrealistic – an image that we can never achieve, and that feeds our insecurity and robs us of our identity.

When you think about it, those comparisons are about wanting to be what the other person is, or have what the other person has. So destructive is this that the Ten Commandments include a commandment specifically about this very thing. It’s the last commandment, number ten. Have a listen (Exodus 20:17):

You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.

Why? Because when we covet, when we want the thing that our neighbour has, it causes us to do one of two things: Either we do the wrong thing and we go and take it (which is what adultery is all about; that’s what theft’s all about), or we don’t take it, but the desire eats away at us like a cancer, and we tell ourselves that we’re not complete without having it. We can’t enjoy our lives without it. Unless we have that one thing that the next guy has, we can never live a life full and contented and happy. What a load of malarkey!

There are some things that you and I will never have; yet the desire for those things can end up ruining your life. Some people desire great wealth, but they can’t attain it. That’s why God says in His Word (Hebrews 6:10):

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich, some have wandered away from their faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

Notice it’s not money which is the root of all evil; it’s the love of money; it’s the desire for money; it’s coveting wealth that becomes the root of all evil, and ends up piercing us with many pains. It’s true.

We’ll talk about that more another time, but there’s an alternative, and here it is. Hebrews 13:5:

Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have, for He has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’.

And that’s the key: Contentment. Have a look around, and consider all the good things that God’s already given you: Your health, your life, the air that you breathe, the roof over your head, the food you’re eating, your family … Just do a stocktake of all that you have … Oh and by the way, the gift of eternal life, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ – a completely new life, through His resurrection … Come on. Add up all the good things that you already have. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how blessed you are. Is it perfect? Is your family perfect? Are your circumstances perfect? No, of course they aren’t. They were never meant to be perfect, but the richness of God’s blessing is utterly mind-blowing.

So here’s the rub: Be content with what you have. Be content with who you are. Be content with your lots in life. Give God thanks for that. Keep blessing Him and praising Him and worshipping Him and living for Him, and all of a sudden, all those stupid ridiculous things that you covet, all those crazy comparisons will simply go away. They’ll pale into insignificance because all of a sudden, you discover how rich you already are in Jesus Christ. Come on … what is it in your life that’s eating away at your self-image? Is it really worth it, or is it time to focus on the good things that God’s already given you?

And that’s the key, you know. We just can’t miraculously all of a sudden overcome our insecurities; it doesn’t work that way. If we could, we would; but we can’t, so we don’t. They just don’t seem to go away on their own, these insecurities. That’s where thanksgiving comes in. The Bible is packed full of exhortations for us to be thankful, and for good reason. 1 Thessalonians 5:18:

Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

 Psalm 107:1:

Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His steadfast love endures forever.

Psalm 50:14:

Offer God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High.

On and on … we’re called to thank God for all the good things, and let me tell you when we do that, He changes us. He takes away that gnawing sense of inadequacy that comes from these silly comparisons, and the terrible coveting and jealousy that He tells us not to have, and He replaces it with an overwhelming sense of joy, irrespective (let me say) of our circumstances; even when things are going against us, in fact especially when things are going against us.

Let me be blunt here: If you’re desiring to have something you can’t have, or to be someone you can’t be, it’s going to be ruining your life. It’s giving you a distorted self-image, and God’s command to you is clear: Stop it! Just don’t do it anymore. Instead, praise God and give thanks, and let Him change you.

You see, God’s already made provision for your deliverance and healing from this terrible disease through the simple and utterly delightful habit of giving thanks to Him. The only question is, what exactly are you waiting for?

Any real estate agent worth half his or her salt will tell you, that your house is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it. Fair enough. So how do you tell what you’re worth in the scheme of things? Really?!