The Core Truths, Part 1 of 4

I was going to do one post for each of the five core truths, but I already did one of them back on January 26: Your faith in yourself can never be stronger than your faith in God.

There's another one that I've been hammering pretty hard: that your value isn't based on a relationship, looks, possession, job, ability, or even what you do for others. This will be a short post about that, mostly because I think it needs to be focused on. We have been trained by people who have been trained by people who believe that we need to be good at something to be valuable. We need to be married or have kids. We need to have a good job. A nice house. A good figure. Sexy. Smart. Funny. All of this says that if we aren't at least some of these things, we're not valuable or, at best, that we'd be more valuable with these things.

And it just isn't true.

I'm not going to dwell on this as I did in other posts, but I do need to say it once here: your value comes from God, because He created you, died for you, made you and adopted child, and loves you with a passion you will never fully understand. This love cannot be earned, not even a small part of it, and that's the best thing about it: it's pure and unchanging.

What I want to focus on in this post is actually the importance of not going halfway with realizing this truth. It's one thing to say that your confidence isn't based on things other than God and another to say it comes from God.

If you went to the dentist with a cavity, she should drill out the cavity and then fill the tooth. If she just fills the tooth without drilling, your tooth will rot from the inside. If she just drills and doesn't fill it, the hole will be bigger than before and the rotting will soon start again.

It's like that with where we get our self-worth. If we just say it comes from God without actively getting it off these other things, we will rot from within. It may be slow, but it is inevitable. If you just tell yourself your worth isn't from these other things, but don't believe that it is from God (even if you tell yourself emptily that it is), you are digging a hole that needs to be filled, that will be filled with something.

You will always have a need to feel valuable. God created you that way. But He also intended for that need to be fulfilled in Him, in a pure and eternal way that no other source could hope to match, so you wouldn't thirst for it from anyone else anymore.

Because of this, though, if you don't really believe your value comes from God, telling yourself it comes from nothing else will set you up for failure because you will have that need and it won't be getting met by anything. It won't die, but become stronger and more desperate until it overcomes you, usually leading you into sin. I know this from recent experience. I thought I was good in my self-confidence. Then I tried ignoring God for several weeks as an experiment. My confidence slowly but surely crumbled, and I returned to several sins I had thought I'd kicked.

The point is that the need has to be met in one way or another. In our flawed human way, we'll always keep feeding it and it will never be enough. With God's way, we will never be perfect at this, but we can meet this need how it was meant to be met. This requires getting to know God on a deep and personal level, not just as holy Judge and Creator, not just as Savior, but as our Father.