Worth of Self

Humans have an innate and engrained need to feel worthy, to feel esteemed.  We are constantly in search of affirmation of our gifts, our talents, and our achievements.  There is an almost law-like phenomenon that every person desires some sense of life-validation, that we yearn to be endorsed as good and worthy.  In and of itself, this inner prompting for validation and worth is not evil, but it how we seek our worth that judges its morality.

Put plain and quite simply, the Lord is the basis for our worth.  He designed us purely for His good pleasure.  He gifted us with life and sustains us moment by moment in the power of His Word.  He is our worth.  Apart from the Lord, there is no thing of worth that man can possess or create, nothing.  This definition of self-worth flies in the face of societal concepts of self-esteem.

The concept of self-esteem stands in opposition to God's desire for the source of our esteem.  He, the Lord, desires that our worth be found solely in Him.  Whenever we strive to determine our worth ourselves, we are settling for less than the worth that God has for us; we are chasing mirages.  The greatest estimation of worth we could possibly make for ourselves still falls pitifully short of God's true determination of our worth.

When we seek to esteem our worth ourselves, we rely on our own imperfect abilities to assess worth; we look to physical capabilities, intellectual prowess, emotional aptitude, or relational finess, et al.  Although each of these traits can be good, they are imperfect because they do not possess any intrinsic worth, meaning that the worth of physical prowess is useless apart from physical activity just as intellectual powers are meaningless severed from an intellectual activity to display their worth.  These are potential measures of worth, yet they are not intrinsically worth anything at all.

Instead, our true worth, as determined by God Himself, is intrinsic because it is not based on a potential worth and it is not dependent whatsoever upon any special activity or practice.  WE are worthy because we are His.  God is the determiner of worth.  When we start thinking in terms of self-esteem or self-worth, we are missing the point entirely.  Because God is the indicator of our worth, we are wholly unable to accurately assess our worth apart from God's prompting.  Let us look to the Lord, the firmest of foundations, as the source of our worth!