Self-Esteem What?

My wife and I were listening to the mid week Into The Wild pod cast from the Free Believers Net work entitled Rebuilding Self-Esteem as she was driving me to the hospital for an appointment, you can if you like, listen to it here.

What I want to share here in light of listening and not agreeing with pretty much most of what was being shared, is hopefully going to shed some light on this whole thang dealing with self-esteem.
It seems that because of the blindness in us all especially dealing with the self, there is an impetus behind the scenes working most clandestinely usually keeping us oblivious to any inkling of its insidious affect upon our seeing straight.
After listening to the aforementioned pod cast, I want to point you to a few thoughts by Oswald Chambers, you can read them here. And Every Virtue We Posses.

I’m going to include a few thoughts from a brother who wrote a book a number of years ago entitled “Christ-Esteem, (Where the Search For Self-Esteem Ends) and how this, along with what Oz shares is most elucidating.

"Most Christians today do not realize how important weakness, failure, discouragement, disappointment, suffering, testing, and trials are in the development of their Christian life. Through these dealings of God our natural sinful pride is being dealt with. God calls us away from ourselves so that through burying, rejecting, and denying self we may turn in faith unto our Lord Jesus and experience life, peace, joy, and power. The apostle Paul wrote, “I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

The Real Enemy

Even though the Bible clearly teaches that every branch that bears fruit gets pruned and that “the Lord disciplines those he loves,” many Bible teachers today promote the heresy that Jesus has taken upon himself all the dealings of the Father so that we might experience his positive blessings, be enlarged, and be comfortable and prosperous in this world. They fail to recognize that we are the problem and God’s purpose is to daily deliver us to the work of the cross so that we might leave self behind. Those who offer this teaching to the church are thereby confirming the children of God in childish immaturity.
Because of this error, many Christians have failed to learn the value of the disciplining work of God and never come to the place of turning away from self. Rather, contrary to his will, they seek God to enlarge and prosper self. For this reason, they never mature in their relationship with God nor discover all their sufficiency in Christ Jesus. They are unable to understand how it is that they can experience various sufferings and even be allowed to fall into sin. Even though they go through their ritualistic binding of the devil and confess the positive promises of the Word of God, nothing works. This seductive “faith teaching” is embraced by many Christians. It is far more popular to blame the devil than to see yourself as the cause of your own problems. To claim “the devil made me do it” is a cop-out.
In dealing with Christians, the devil does not operate through direct confrontation. While he is shrewdly working behind the scenes, the manifest enemy is not the devil, but our sinful, self-centered, and proud human existence. In the Garden of Eden, it was not the purpose of the devil to tempt Eve to make a choice between worshiping him and worshiping God. Eve would have never given into that temptation. The choice was between human pride—the desire to be like God—and worshiping and serving God himself. After Adam and Eve fell into sin, the devil drops out of the picture. You hear very little about him in the Old Testament. Once man is corrupted and turns in on himself, he will disobey God and destroy his fellowman without the devil reminding him to do so.

When Jesus determined to do the will of his Father in heaven and thereby deny his life, the devil appeared on the scene. The three temptations that he used in the wilderness against Jesus were not directed at committing and great sins against God but were temptations directing Jesus to live unto himself, to be concerned with his own comforts, and to preserve his own life.
Many people are concerned today by the increase in occult activities and the growing popularity of Satan worship. While these activities are certainly dangerous and destructive they also serve as a smoke screen blinding us to the real enemy in the church which is self-esteem, positive confession, and positive-self-image teaching. These teachings seduce the people of God into focusing their attention upon enlarging themselves, feeling good about themselves, and even in some situations, desiring to be like God. Many people today have fallen into this snare of the devil.
The devil doesn’t care how religious we are as long as we live for ourselves, remain consciously wrapped up in ourselves, try to feel good about ourselves, and cover up the nakedness of empty, meaningless lives through a spiritual charade. Martin Luther wrote concerning self-indulgence and human pride: “Against this secret villain we must pray God daily suppress our self-esteem.”

Rich

Religion

What I am about to share here I know will be a bitter pill for many to swallow, but the truth is that outside of Christ it is ALL religion - period!
Every time I hear either from my own mouth or from so many others using terms such as “organized religion” “institutional church” or others, what I keep hearing is folks simply describing mere symptoms of the problem which is in my opinion religion.

Too many are still seeing the “institutional church” to be their enemy when in fact it is merely a shadow of an entity that has successfully hidden and disguised itself within this outer expression of smoke and mirrors. The father of all lies, and religion being but an expression of those lies, is what has beguiled the entire world. Scriptures report that the whole world lies under the (influence) power of the wicked one, Satan.

Without eyes to see the truth of an impetus behind empowering ideologies, doctrines and teachings of philosophy, etc. we will keep shadow-boxing at best. But, if we by God’s spirit begin to recognize that any and all ensnarement comes by adhering to and imbibing from a commingled message, one of grace mixed with (religion) law then we are seeing beyond shifting shadows.

I love how Jesus exposed the real source of corruption and entanglement when he warned his disciples NOT about the Pharisees, but of the LEAVEN of the Pharisees, and to further elucidate this point I want to say this: that it would be so easy to mistake what Jesus said regarding the leaven. It was not a building or a teaching exclusive to a small demographic known as the Pharisees, but in my opinion Jesus was making it undeniably clear that this ‘leaven’ is in us ALL!

According to scriptures we, the re-birthed have been “translated out of the kingdom of darkness and been transferred into our Father’s family of love”.
We have been made one with a Life that is totally foreign to the world we were all born into; it is that which was made available to Adam and Even in the Garden represented in the Tree of Life, and in choosing to imbibe in ‘knowledge’ vs life, they didn’t loose anything, they of their free choosing forfeited that privilege instead.

There is no longer any corruption or toxic contamination within the real you and me, we have been made whole and complete in becoming one with God our Father in our spirit union, but, within our flesh which includes our soul and body the hideous parasite of sin that covertly and insidiously works to try to keep us from seeing and knowing the experiential reality of His incorruptible and indestructible life from being “fully formed” in us as us! The Matrix of religion has a motto much like the Borg from the TV series Star Trek the Next Generation, “resistance is futile, and you will be assimilated.”
The invasiveness of His life has present tense, freed us from the power of sin and death, this holy (wholly) and righteous infection is slowly infecting and affecting more and more of the rest of us that so desperately needs His saving keeping grace.
I see it being so much more than simply being changed; it is a continuous ongoing transformation.

Rich

Blessed Are You

In not knowing the truth of God the Father and his love for us, we merely exist, some might even call it, “dead men walking.”
Those who have ears to hear, and eyes to see said Jesus, let them feast upon the hidden manna the fertile and fruitful one, Christ in us.

There is a story in the Old Testament 1Samuel 1, where it talks about a man who had two wives, one bore him children and the other Hannah could not, because the Lord had shut up her womb.
It goes on to say, “And her rival (the other wife) used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb. So it went on year by year. As often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. And Elkanah, her husband, said to her, "Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?"

There is such wonderful liberating truth in this, at least for me. What I see so clearly is as follows. What all of us are not discerning except for those who have had it revealed to them, is that everything that we assume is God working through many that we look upon or up to, as being vibrant, fruitful leader types, are in fact if it is NOT His life in them as them, are merely a cheap and bewitching mirage.

We like Hannah despise our bareness, but the kicker is that it is the Lord God himself who has like wise closed our womb, why, so that we don’t have to resort to fleshly means to see His life, fruitfulness realized in us.
There is NO one who jumps up and down ecstatically when they hear Him say, “Blessed are you who are poor, barren, fruitless, mourn etc, why, being weak, lifeless, unfruitful apart from Him is not very attractive, so, the alternative is to succumb to becoming bewitched. When we no longer measure ourselves by His unconditional love for us, we resort to looking in the mirror of performing all over again. We compare ourselves with one another and see how we fail, fall short according to the lies we have once gain become ensnared in, and start competing.

There are NO short cuts to knowing Him, it is either going to Be a living walking talking miracle of His grace bringing forth His life inwardly and outwardly in us, or we’re going to shop at the nearest boutique of vogue stick and past forms of godliness!

Rich