When someone is treated like they are special all their lives pretty soon they start to believe it. This is what the self-esteem teaching has done for many people brought up in the 70's, 80's and 90's and now into the 2000's.
We are living in an age when people believe they are entitled to be treated special even if they never do anything to earn it. This is the reason it is so difficult to convince people they are sinful by nature and in need of a Savior.
It has become acceptable and popular to praise people for the smallest things, thinking this is building confidence but in reality, it is reducing confidence and building pride.
Pride is not the same as confidence. Pride causes a person to elevate themselves above what is warranted without having done the difficult work of testing and failing until a problem is solved.
Confidence comes from having done the hard work to learn something valuable from trial and error, that gave them the skills needed to become proficient at their trade. In order to become confident one has to tell the truth about themselves, claiming their own flaws and failures and determining to change what needs to be changed.
No one gains confidence without trials and failures, perseverance and eventually success. No one gainst confidence who look at themselves in honesty and own their own their own defect in character. It is only in admitting our defects that we can change them. Those who will not admit they have flaws will never change and they will never learn.
Those who do not face their own demons will never be able to correct anything within themselves.
Most people today expect relationships to be easy without work and without confession and repentance. No relationship can develop into a lasting and deep one without going through various life experiences, sad, happy, difficult, and easy, with laughter, tears, resolution to problems, and the joy of reconciliation.
Without problem solving there can be no emotional maturity. Those who avoid facing their own flaws and working through the flaws of others will never mature, they remain emotional and spiritual infants without the skills to make it through life having grown and matured into wise elders.
Spiritual and emotional maturity is uncommon in our day and becomes less all the time as we march toward the tribulation. We see now why the devil can manipulate and control so many people. When he has convinced them they can be their own gods no one else can convince them otherwise.
The same lie the devil told Eve in the garden is the lie people are being told today, that they are special and can be in complete control of their own destiny and life outcomes.
Many actually believe all they have to do is think something about themselves and that makes it so. Nothing has to be real as long as they like what they are thinking. Self delusion is rampant in our day, lies are unrestrained and defended far more than truth.
Parents "pride" themselves on how positive they are with their children and the children are less able to progress in their studies and other life experiences. We have been raising spiritual pigmies without the ability to reason rationally.
I don't say these things to make anyone angry but rather to open the eyes of those who have been confused not knowing why things don't work out and why there is no longer any love in the world around them. The love is gone because God has been rejected, the Author of love and all His way spurned.
2 Timothy 4:3-4
"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables."
Beloved brothers and sisters, do not become discouraged, keep doing what the Holy Spirit tells you to do, and keep looking up our redemption is drawing near.
