Self Esteem Is Still A Sin

40 years ago after I became born again, I stood against many sins that others were telling us not to judge.

The one that caused the most stir was my strong belief that the "self esteem" teaching was against God and the teachings of the bible. Many church goers argued that we all have to have "self esteem", but none of them could use scripture to justify it.

We are born with too much self esteem. We have to be taught to think of others first, we have to be taught to give up our rights for the greater good.

Philippians 2;3
"Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves;" Other translations say "esteem others better than yourself."

Another lie that used to be spoken often was that we have to love ourselves first before we can love anyone else. That was a teaching from the pit of hell. We managed to get many people to justify self focus, even saying things like; "today I am going to do something just for me for a change."

The people I knew who used that phrase were always doing something just for themselves, there was no change in it.

Humble, loving, giving believers are not thinking of ways to continually get for themselves, they are those who are serving others, and enjoying it so much they don't have time to think about themselves. They don't notice they are not getting their way, and they are not noticing how much they get in return, that is not important to them.

There is emptiness in the lives of those who fight for their own "esteem." There is never enough of it, the more we esteem ourselves the more esteem we desire, it is a sort of addiction.

Whatever we foster in ourselves the most, is the character trait that will rule us.

Perhaps those who fight to argue for self esteem, are those who want it so badly for themselves that they cannot conceive of not having it.

John 3:30
"30 He must increase, but I must decrease." God calls us to diminish our own importance and enhance the importance of Christ, the more we do this the less we think of self and the more we think of others.

The devil knew just how to cloak the self esteem lie in various forms of verbiage to make it sound good, after all ear tickling is the job of the devil. Getting people to believe a lie while making them feel like they are helping someone with it, is the greatest deception of the devil. He used it on Eve in the garden, he said "you can be like God."

With the verbiage concerning self esteem he was saying, "you need to love yourself, it will help you love others." When God said to us that we are not capable of loving, it is only in Christ that we can know how to love and actually live it.

1 John 4:19 "19 We love Him[a] because He first loved us."

1 John 4:20 "If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen."

Jeremiah 17:9 ""The heart is more deceitful than all else And is desperately sick; Who can understand it?"

No person without Christ can love, we are without God's kind of love before we are born again.

Ephesians 3:17-21
"17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— 19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

20 Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, 21 to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen"