For each of us, our self-image defines reality for us. Our self-image is our North Star. We use it to get our bearings and plot our course through life. If we get our bearings wrong, mistakenly thinking we are at a certain point on a map, we will interpret everything else we see – whether close or on the horizon – according to our mistaken belief. We will get everything wrong and yet, apart from a little confusion, we will have no idea that we are mistaken.

Our self-image is so fundamental that if we get that wrong, we are completely lost and don’t even know it. And that’s such a scary thought that most of us prefer not to question our presumptions.

So to summarize, for each of us, our self-image seems rock-solid reality, and rather than conclude that we have got it wrong, we interpret everything else to fit our conception of reality. The disturbing thing is that our self-image is usually wrong or distorted, which leads to a wrong or distorted understanding of just how important and loved of God we are and how enormous is our ability to achieve great things.

With few exceptions, our self-image is not something we have carefully and rationally investigated, but something we picked up primarily when we were little, easily influenced, children. We got it from our guess about how we supposed certain people thought of us. These people happened to be very significant in shaping our lives but, like all people, they were very fallible.

We were too young to know any different, but we virtually turned these significant people in our lives into our God – our infallible source of truth. The real God is now challenging us to make him our God, and redefine our sense of reality according to who he says we are, rather than the person we have presumed we are – a presumption we have clung to for our entire life, or most of it.

We desperately need to redefine our self-image. Unfortunately, we find this a scary mega shift. Our whole perception of reality is threatened. It means admitting that we really have been lost and everything we thought was real, was an illusion. Rather than come to terms with that, most of us stubbornly hold on to our self-image, refusing to believe that we have got wrong something so fundamental, even though it is something that was thrust on us as a child, not something we have carefully – much less, prayerfully – thought through.

Most of us have for so long presumed that we are of little value that we have cemented this lie into our self-image, worshipping it as truth, our North Star. The implications of retaining this false self-image are terrifying, but do we have the courage and sense of adventure to engage in the mega shift of a radically new self-image, or will we remain in the security of the familiar, even though it keeps us languishing in the mud of mediocrity and despair?

All of us were brought up to accept a false self-image. Though we probably did not think of it in these terms, we might have even been subjected to what amounts to relentless brainwashing during our most impressionable years by authoritative-sounding accusations that we are “hopeless’ or “stupid” or other such lies. This so powerfully shapes one’s self-image that the victims accept it as truth and subconsciously reject anything that suggests otherwise.

From the way highly inadequate but significant humans in our lives have verbally or even physically abused us, many of us quickly conclude that we are unlovable, and so we interpret everything else in life according to this lie. For instance, our head might tell us that God loves us, but our heart will scream the opposite and refuse to accept the reality of God’s love. But despite what everything in your experience might shriek at you, the truth is astounding: you are of infinite value. That seems beyond belief, so I’ll have to explain.

If we stumbled upon natural diamonds in a wilderness, most of us would ignorantly walk over them and treat them as dirt, having no clue as to their value and how exquisite they would look if expertly cut and polished. Likewise, most people might walk all over you and treat you as dirt, having no clue that you are priceless. Only God sees your true worth because he alone has the astounding expertise to transform you into an exquisite jewel. It matters not what you can do or how others see you. All that matters is the staggering power of God to transform into something of breathtaking beauty what everyone else thinks is a worthless lump.

A diamond is just a piece of rock. It can’t love, talk or think. You can’t eat it, cook with it, hunt with it, keep warm with it, and so for centuries vast numbers of tribal people considered diamonds worthless. A diamond’s worth is based not on what it can do but simply because of what people are willing to pay to have it. You are far more precious to God than tons of diamonds and he paid a far higher price than all the wealth of a million earths – the willing sacrificial death of his holy Son – to have you as his best friend.

Like a huge diamond, your worth is not based on what you do. You are of infinite value because of the infinite price the God of the universe willingly paid for your friendship. And if he has invested so much in you, he will treasure you and cherish you for all eternity.

For your entire life you might have been surrounded by people who were unable to see your value, like Stone Age natives who cannot see the value of a diamond. But God’s view of you is astonishingly different.

Who are you going to make your God – your source of truth who determines your self-image? Will you assign that role to the ignorant savages around you, or to the God of infinite wisdom and knowledge who gave his Holy Son for you?

To plunder what I have written elsewhere:

Something stupendous happened the moment you spiritually united to Christ. Instantly, your status and potential rocketed heavenward, leaving the person you used to be so mind-bogglingly far behind that, along with every other Christian, you actually need divine psychiatric help (Ephesians 1:16-19; Colossians 1:9; Philemon 6) to grasp the merest fraction of the enormity of what has happened to you (Ephesians 3:19-20; 1 John 3:1-2).

We Christians are like paupers ecstatic because we think we have inherited $10,000, when we’ve actually received $1 billion. We live chronically impoverished lives and the less we know of our spiritual inheritance, the greater the tragedy.

The gulf between who you think you are and who you really are is so serious and so beyond normal comprehension (Ephesians 3:19-20; 1 John 3:1-2) that whereas some psychiatric patients have delusions of grandeur – supposing themselves to be ridiculously more important than they really are – you and I suffer the opposite problem. What God did within us, without us even knowing it, was so staggering that even Christians with dangerously inflated egos suffer from what I call delusions of insignificance.

The psychiatric definition of a delusion is a false notion that cannot be altered by reasoning. That’s why I could write a million words and the implications still won’t hit home without supernatural revelation. A major task of the Holy Spirit is to help us grasp the enormity of the transformation that has taken place within us (John 16:14; 1 Corinthians 2:9-15; 1 John 4:13; Ephesians 3:3-5; John 14:26; 16:13). It is vital that we keep probing the Scriptures (2 Corinthians 4:6-7) and pleading for spiritual revelation as to who we are in Christ.

Drown the doubts, insecurities and guilt feelings. Cling to the emphatic Word of God that affirms that God’s estimation of you is far too immense for human fame or shame to budge it (e.g., Galatians 2:6; Ephesians 6:9; Job 34:19). Whether the high point of your Sundays is counting the souls you have won or counting the specks on your pew, the King delights in you.

What has happened is so far beyond our expectations that even after glimpsing a little of who we now are, we keep reverting to our old self-image. You are so different to what you once were that it will be a long, uphill battle just to turn your thinking around until your thinking is consistently even in the right direction, to say nothing of it being as far as it should be.

It is so frustratingly easy to let go of the truth about God’s view of ourselves and slip back into our former depressed thinking. Keep praying for a revelation. Keep trying to claw your faith higher. Keep pushing out the million doubts. Keep flooding your mind with the glorious truths that will set you free. And rest in the certainty that Almighty God has invested everything – even the death of his precious Son – to ensure you make it.

Our current mindset and self-image took our entire life to form and harden. To reverse this and create a new self-image corresponding to how the King of kings sees us is a long and laborious process in which it is perversely easy to slip back into our old dreary mode of thinking. In a flash we changed in God’s eyes from a debased child of the devil to an exalted child of God. For us to catch up with this in the way we view ourselves, however, is slow, arduous slog. In fact, we will need to keep working on it for the rest of our lives.

Numbers 13:33  . . . We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.

For insight into another biblical example, let me again quote myself:

A woman was praying for the home-fellowship I attend when she saw ‘mighty man of valor’ written above me. I don’t care whether you think that was of God; when she shared her experience with me it put steel in my wishbone. That boost has given me an inkling of why God speared those very words into Gideon’s head (Judges 6:12).

I’d have worried about Gideon staggering around with a size 20 head. A healthy self-image must be more important to God than I had thought. Those ego-inflating words coincided with Gideon’s divine call. Faith in those words apparently played a critical role in his future ministry.

Here’s what I wrote near the end of my favorite web book. You can apply it to all my writings:

Despite my relentless longing to share these truths, it hurts to let this book be published. The more I work on the book, the more immersed in its truths I become. It’s continually washing away layer after grimy layer of negativity and buoying me ever higher. I hate the thought of this process ever ending, but dour experience affirms that it will – soon after I put the book down. I have had to reread it scores of times to halt my slide back into the bog. And still I need it.

Though my need is chronic, I doubt if the mildest affliction could be relieved forever through a single reading of this book. I expect you to feel better after a single dose but regular doses are essential for a permanent cure. So I urge you to keep this book handy, even after completing it. Long-term problems need long-term solutions. I covet a new life for you, not just a momentary easing of the pain. Experience suggests you will need this book year after year. We never reach the point where temptation leaves us forever.

Negative thoughts have been roosting in our heads, pecking away at the fruit beginning to form in our lives. We’ve shooed these pests away, but they will stealthily return. That’s our cue to skim through the book again. Highlight the parts that especially speak to you or uplift you. Personalize them. Write them out. Display them. Memorize them. Add to them. Share them. Live them. They will keep the vermin away and bring you to new levels of fruitfulness.

Find ingenious ways to keep in your consciousness truths you particularly need. At work I must set and use several computer passwords. I might say to myself I can do all things through Christ, while typing the first letter of each word. ICDATTC then becomes my new password. No one could guess such an apparently random string of letters and I can remember it only by rehearsing in my mind that positive declaration every time I must use it. Perhaps you could put a little heart somewhere to remind you how much you are loved by God. There are thousands of possibilities. Finding some that work for you will be well worth the effort.

I’d be thrilled if my expressions sometimes help. I have tried to shape them to stick in slippery memories. But don’t be chained to my words. Using your words will help the truths become yours. And don’t be confined to the paltriness of my insight. Hound God with the passion and confidence of a cherished lover until you receive your own Bible-based, Christ-centered revelations.

No matter how hot it’s served or how much it’s sweetened, second-hand revelation is as insipid as second-hand tea leaves unless the Holy Spirit comes upon you, exploding those words within you with such power that it becomes your own divine encounter. A hand-me-down word from God might bring a little refreshment, but a truth super-charged by the Spirit of God percolating through one’s life is so superior that no cost is too high a price to pay for it. Fervent prayer and Bible meditation is the usual price.

Though I have prayed incessantly that this book bless you as much as it has me, I fear I’m asking God to break one of his principles. Why should he command us to seek and to ask and devote our lives to poring over Scripture unless that’s the way he prefers to reveal his truth? It is truths in the heart, not words in a book, that set us free. And lodging them there takes spiritual and mental effort. I crave the joy of serving you by doing all the prayer and study, but that’s like trying to play tennis for you – I get the healthy exercise and you miss all the fun.

Related Pages

To God, You Are Special When you doubt your ability to achieve great things for God

Hounded by Guilt Help when you doubt God’s forgiveness

Help When Doubt Knocks

Cure for Self-hate

Feel Ugly? Could You Have a Distorted Body Image?

“I hate myself!” A page that provides many more valuable links

© Copyright 1985-1996, 2008, Grantley Morris. May be freely copied in whole or in part provided: it is not altered; this entire paragraph is included; readers are not charged and it is not used in a webpage. Many more compassionate, inspiring, sometimes hilarious writings available free online at www.net-burst.net  Freely you have received, freely give. For use outside these limits, consult the author.