Stop and think: Where in Scripture do you find the term self-esteem? How about self-love? I’ll save you some trouble; you won’t find those terms in Scripture. They, along with self-actualization and a few others, are buzzwords of our contemporary society.

Of course, there are many words and phrases we use today which are not used in Scripture, and vice-versa, so the issue is the meaning and philosophy that has grown up around those terms. Scripture gives a different perspective of these self issues.

The only mention of self-love in the Bible is that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, which simply assumes we will naturally love ourselves. It is not a directive to love ourselves. There aren’t too many people who don’t truly love themselves quite well.

Self-esteem is the idea of having a high regard for one’s self. While we should know clearly that we are important to God, we are valuable, and we are special and worthwhile because God has declared that to be true, we cannot lose sight of the truth that our value is not found in ourselves.

I think we tend to attribute too much to poor self-esteem, and thereby believe if we can think better of ourselves, our problems will go away. Trying to feel good about something that by nature is not good, is a losing battle. That’s a different mindset than having respect for who we are in Christ and therefore appreciating your “self.” Maybe self-appreciation is a better term for us than self-esteem. The subtleties between the two are important.

Scripture teaches us our best self-efforts are like filthy rags to God. I think of Philippians 2, which says we should esteem or consider others more important than ourselves. Paul wrote to the Romans that our old self was crucified with Christ. Jesus taught us to deny ourselves and take up our cross.

That’s the biblical view of self we’ve somehow lost in our humanistic society where self has been elevated to the highest place of importance. As Christians, we need to have our minds re-shaped into biblical molds. The Christian’s identity search should end forever with the incredible realization that we are, through his grace, now called the children of God. Amazing, absolutely overwhelming. That self-identity will carry us until we see him face to face.