The Doctrine of “Self-Esteem”

The video that I’m going to show you is a shocking one. I’ve been surfing the internet via the “next” feature (courtesy of WordPress) and have stumbled across some extreme heresies. Here is a perfect example of one:

Because of this esteem-boosting sermon (the NOOMA message; I totally agreed with the actual message), I’ve decided to post my sermon that counters this (what I truly believe is a) heresy. This will be posted in article format, and therefore will be edited for reading rather than hearing. You can find the actual manuscript on my Sermons page.

“Bring out the goddess in you.” Anyone know what that is a slogan for? Venus Razors for Women. We are so special that razors can give us deistic qualities. We live in a culture where from age 2 we are taught how special we are, how unique we are, how much worth we have. As we get older, we find out that to be happy we must have and to have we must be the best at acquiring. Presidential candidates boast that they are “your president,” as if it is an honor to be running for such an amazing, special person.

Allow me to let you in on a little secret: you are nothing special. You, by yourself, in yourself, are worthless. The sooner that you come to that realization, the sooner you can begin experiencing everything God has for you. But if you keep living under the illusion that what our culture tells you about how special you are is true, you will miss out on what God wants for you, and what He wants is your total reliance on Him. What He wants for you is for you not to define yourself based on your works, actions, talents, looks, wallet, social status, education, or even who you know. God wants you to define yourself based on Who He is. Jesus, in Matthew 5.1-5 agrees:

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth…”

We find here a list of radically culturally-contradictory statements made by Jesus Christ. At the very beginning of Christ’s most famous sermon (The Sermon on the Mount), it appears as though He contradicts Himself by saying “blessed are you who have nothing, feel poorly, and want.” That’s completely opposite of what our culture teaches us, and, to be honest, it was completely opposite of what the culture of Jesus’ time taught. Walking around Israel were holier-than-thou Pharisees, who prided themselves on how highly God thought of them. They would make public declarations every time they gave an offering and wailed and howled every time they said a prayer. They wanted attention and found worth in the eyes of man. They found worth in the misconception that holy people are proud people, and, as we know God loves holy people. All of a sudden, this Man comes up and starts preaching against all of those things. How can this be? Weren’t the Pharisees the “men of God”? Does this mean that Jesus was wrong in what He was saying? The answer to that is a resounding: NO! Those who were wrong were the ones who thought that having a high opinion of oneself was godly.

It’s not godly at all. And Jesus drives that point home with these things called the beatitudes. But, what are these things and what do they even mean?

The very first thing that catches everyone’s eye is the word “blessed.” What does this word mean? The common misconception is that this word means “happy.” That is not true at all. If it were, this passage would almost be a depressing creed of some sort: Happy are those who have nothing. Happy are those who weep. Happy are those who are hungry. That doesn’t fit; that doesn’t even make sense. The word “blessed,” here, means “congratulated.” The word has the connotation of “you have achieved the goal, and therefore you are favored by God.” The goals are those attributes listed here. You aren’t born with an innate desire to humble yourself, that’s a God-process. Once allow God to work in your life, then, then you have achieved the goal. The rewards God has for you for achieving the goals are those predicates listed here: kingdom of God, comfort, etc. But I don’t want to focus on the reward or the blessedness because if I do, I fear that our goal will become achieving the prize, not achieving Christ-likeness. So for the remainder of the morning, I want to focus on the first three beatitudes and what they mean for us.

The first beatitude that we come across is “blessed are the poor in spirit.” Jesus put these in an order that made sense. These are not randomly stated, but are meticulously planned to be a hierarchy of sorts. When we view these in that manner, we find that the very first step in favoring God and becoming like His Son is the recognition of our spiritual poverty. Look at Ephesians 2.1-3:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

How depressing is that?! The fact of the matter is, though, its true! You are dead in sin when you don’t have Christ. You have a carcass for a soul. But you are fooled into believing that you are fine, that your soul really isn’t dead. By saying that, by believing it, by thinking it, you are declaring yourself worthy regardless of the cross.

How many times do you hear those outside the faith rationalize the belief that they are going to heaven when they die by saying this: “Yea, I’m going to heaven when I die. I mean, I’ve been a good person. I’ve been there for my wife and kids. I have a good house that I can afford. I don’t really have any enemies, so of course I’m going to heaven.” Do you realize how sad that statement is? It’s sad because it speaks about earning heaven by your own good merit. The problem is that you are a human being who neither has merit or anything spiritually good. To not realize that is to ignore the necessity of God.

So, Jesus is saying in this passage: blessed are those who realize that they are nothing, have nothing, and contribute nothing to My perfectness. The first step into not only getting into heaven but being an active child of God is admitting you have a problem: you are nothing. John MacArthur puts it this way:

This speaks of a deep humility regarding one’s utter spiritual bankruptcy apart from God. It describes those who are acutely conscious of their own lostness and hopelessness apart from divine grace.

Question: do you go to the doctor when you are feeling healthy? Do you plead your physician to quickly diagnose you because you are feeling great? No, you don’t. Do you go to the doctor under the suspicion that something is wrong regardless of the fact that you have no evidence? No, you don’t. In the same manner, you won’t go to Jesus Christ when you think you don’t need Him. Jesus Himself said in Matthew 9.12 that He didn’t come to heal those that did not want it:

When Jesus heard that, He said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick…For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”

Jesus isn’t implying that some of them didn’t need Him; He’s not saying that there were already righteous people who needed not the cross. Jesus is being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here by saying, “I’m not here for those who already think they are good enough. Are they good enough? Not at all. But until they realize that, I’m not for them.” Salvation cannot come to the self-righteous. It can’t. Only when you believe with all your heart what Romans 3 says about how worthless you are can you meet Jesus for Who He is. When we do realize that, when we come to the realization that without Christ we are nothing, have nothing, and contribute nothing, then Christ can come and heal us; then Christ can come and cleanse our sins. And when that happens, we become citizens of heaven for, as we just read, “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The next beatitude is specifically placed because what logically follows the realization that we are completely bankrupt spiritually is mourning over our worthlessness. You see, mourning shows that you are not OK with your worthlessness; that you are content with your emptiness. Spiritual mourning shows a desire to have more than nothing, but not just any old “more,” the abundant life that Jesus Christ has to offer. Look at what 2 Corinthians 7.10 says:

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

If you are sad about something, if you are truly burdened by an area of your life that you are not happy with, you will seek to change it. That’s what this beatitude is saying: realization is not enough. You can’t just know that you are dead. You must want to be alive! And the promise of mourning of our own wretchedness is a comfort that doesn’t make sense. One writer says:

What an inexpressible comfort it is to stop mourning over the guilt of sin because God in Christ has removed it.

Mourning is a state of mind brought about by the realization of our own appalling nothingness in light of God’s everythingness. God Almighty bestows a portion of Himself upon us that transcends our need; He gives us more of Him than we ever could even imagine. In light of that, because of that, we are humbled as we realize that we pale in comparison to God. It does not stop there. This realization is nothing without action. The definition of mourning is what follows our realization that we are less than dirt without God. When we act upon that by devoting ourselves to God and declaring our dire need for him, that, that is mourning. Mourning is the cleaning out of the carcass of the soul so that God can reside in us.

You have to mourn to be comforted. You can’t be comforted if there is nothing to comfort. In the same manner, you have to mourn over your sin, over your wretchedness, before Christ’s blood can cover your sins and, consequently, comfort you. Before you can have joy in Christ, you must have sorrow, deep mourning, in your wretchedness.

The last beatitude that I want to look at today is probably one of the most confusing and debated over beatitudes. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Many people argue that “meek” means “weak.” That belief couldn’t be more flawed. On the contrary, many meek men in the bible were also very strong men. For instance, Moses displayed incredible, righteous indignation when he came down from the Holy Mountain and shattered the Decalogue against the ground. But, at the same time, Numbers 12.3 says this about him:

Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.

If “meek” means “weak,” than either Moses didn’t kill anybody or the writer or Numbers didn’t know Moses well enough to make that call. That fact of the matter is, though, that Moses was meek and very strong. He wasn’t weak at all.

So what does “meek” mean? The best definition I could find is a quote by A. W. Tozer. This is what he says:

The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God declared him to be, but paradoxically, he knows at the same time that he is in the sight of God of more importance than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. That is his motto.

Meekness is the realization that God is in control. No matter what storms, no matter what trials, no matter what persecutions we go through, meekness is the understanding that each time we suffer is a time that God has ordained. Remember Job? Nothing that happened to Job was outside of God’s will or permission. The meek man realizes that, recognizes that, lives by that. Even in the face of persecution, the meek man remembers:

“Vengeance is Mine, I shall repay,” says the Lord.

As one writer said,

These are the individuals who understand their spiritual poverty, mourn over their lost condition and are willing to submit their lives to the will of God.

When you realize how direly you need God, and when you give Him your life, meekness is humble trust in the will of God. Providence Himself promises to always be there, promises to give us a future with hope, and promises to come back. The meek man not only knows and believes this, but he is affected by it in his daily dealings with other people. The important thing to remember is this: this rare and often misunderstood beatitude cannot occur or come into existence without the actions of the first two. all three build off each other as man slowly destroys the thought that he is something. Man is nothing without God.

Have you heard of the movie, “The Incredibles”? This is a movie about a supposedly ordinary family who is, in fact, a bunch of superheroes. The title of my sermon is “The Nothing-Specials.” This is because true Christians aren’t anything special in it of themselves. Friends, true Christians are only special in Christ Jesus. Do you live that way? Does God look at your heart and say, “Blessed…”?

The Christianity that exists today is the Dr. Phil Christianity. Take a look at the contemporary worship songs. The pronouns “I,” “me,” and/or “my” are used more frequently than the names “God,” ‘Christ,” or “Jesus.” This is diagnostic. Christians are wrapped up in themselves and honest-to-goodness believe that they are the center of Christ’s attention because of they inherent specialness. They believe that God has faith in us. That’s heresy. That’s blaspheme. Just read Romans 3.