Sometimes when people tell us that we have hurt them, we become angry and defensive. We don’t want to take on more blame than we deserve. We find a way to turn the blame back on them. We blame them for hurting us. But the truth is the pain that we feel comes from our own realization of being sinners, and not wanting to be a sinner because we must protect our view of ourselves. We want to see ourselves in a good light. Admitting being a sinner is admitting failure. It is survival, we must protect our view of ourselves because if we are not good people even though we try to be, we are a failure at life. We don’t want to admit that we have faults, because then we can’t evaluate ourselves as a good person. We need to see ourselves as a good person because self-worth is based on seeing yourself in a good light. Self-esteem is liking yourself, and you can’t like yourself if you are not a good person.
But the truth is, we are not good. Our sin nature is not likable and we can’t get rid of it. But our sin nature is not us. Our true self is our spirit which is redeemed by God and it is only “good” because Christ has redeemed it, not because of our own success. We ourselves could never be good. But we can love our redeemed selves, not because of goodness but because of gratefulness to God with humility. We can love our “self” that is clean and redeemed by God. But we still have to fully own (admit to) our sinfulness; it is a part of us. The fact that we are still sinners does not have to threaten our love/acceptance of ourselves; we can love ourselves the exact way that God does. He loves us even in our sin because we are worth it not because of righteous things we have done but because of his grace. We can love ourselves in spite of our sinfulness because we have been redeemed. This is a humble love for ourselves because we did not earn our lovableness, God provided our value by his choice to love us. When we try to love ourselves because we are so good it is based on a lie, a false evaluation of ourselves, because no one is good even on their best days. Goodness is not achievable, so if goodness is the indicator of self-like, no one can every really like themselves legitimately because we are sinners and will continue to sin until death. We need to have a healthy love and acceptance of ourselves based on what God has done, not what we have done. And we need to fully accept that we are not only sinners, but we are responsible for each and every one of our sinful thoughts and actions, and we need to hold ourselves responsible for our sin rather than deny that it exists.
“A complete knowing of our self in relation to God requires knowing our self as deeply loved by God, our self as deeply sinful, and our self as in a process of being redeemed and restored.” “A genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcome parts of self.” David Benner
When we recognize that we don’t need to be “good” to be a valuable person, we are free to accept ourselves, the good, bad, and the ugly. We can acknowledge our shortcomings and not be so threatened. We can listen to the feelings of others and actually care about how they feel and apologize when necessary, even when we ourselves are in pain. When we know our true identity in Christ, we become secure. We become strong enough to hear painful things about ourselves. And we become strong enough to care about others in spite of the pain.
