It occurred to me today that so many people have outgrown their need for God.

Now, to start, I must admit that I am making the above statement facetiously. As a Christian, I believe in my need for a savior, and I’m going to discuss that in this post. But, unfortunately, I do also understand that there are people who think that religious faith is a childish thing. For them, denying themselves a relationship with God is a sign of their enlightenment.

Many of these people have walked away from the church, and an active relationship with God, because of a movement that I think is dangerous, if taken to extremes –aren’t all movements, when taken to extremes, dangerous?– and that is the self-esteem movement.

Now, as I begin, I must be clear that I am not in favor of people being made to feel excessively bad about themselves by other people who are attempting to manipulate them, usually for their own gain. Unfortunately, at times, the church as a political organization has been guilty of such tactics.

However, I think this approach can probably best be exemplified in the example of commercial advertising, especially as it pertains to products like fashion items (think, jewelry and clothes and shoes and such), cosmetics, plastic surgery, etc. Advertising for things such as these will often target people with subtle –oh so subtle– hints at how bad we look and how much we need something to make us look better. These manipulative attacks are inappropriately targeting people who have low self-esteem for the purposes of making a buck, and they would have been considered shameless not so long ago.

For example, some estimates suggest that women, during their adult life, will spend approximately a quarter of a million dollars on products to make themselves look better. The cosmetics industry is actively marketing solutions to problems that these women don’t actually have! Why is it that women, and increasingly men, are made to feel as if they need to buy these products? Just an example of esteem being lowered by the world so that they can then sell you the remedy to how they’ve made you feel.

However, the other extreme –situations in which people are made to feel excessively good about themselves by those who would manipulate them– seems to get much less press. I know it gets less press because I can feel inside my mind how much more difficult it is to come up with an example of such circumstances as these. But, be that as it may, let’s see if I can illuminate an example.

The danger on this particular polar end of the ‘self-esteem manipulation continuum’ is that we have been made to feel really good about ourselves by entities that want us to feel good about ourselves in order to keep us from doing things (read: uprisings or revolts) that would be counterproductive to their agendas.

If we were to ever end up feeling bad –appropriately so, I sometimes think– because of our circumstances and the world around us, we might not agree to play by the rules anymore. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed a period in America’s history like this past year, a period that involved so much protesting against the status quo. People are starting to get fed up; that certainly won’t do if those in power are hoping to keep them ‘under control’.

I don’t want to go all ‘Matrix’ on you, or anything like that, but the movie –if you haven’t ever seen it, then you absolutely must– is one giant metaphor for the situation in which most of us find ourselves –> programmed to believe the lies that we are being subjected to, in order to keep us from fighting against a system that isn’t really doing any of us a whole lot of good.

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Of course, once we are controlled by others as to how we feel about ourselves, then we can be manipulated into making decisions that aren’t in our best interests. Avoiding the extremes, which I often recommend, means that we ought not to feel too badly about ourselves –as to open ourselves up to manipulation– or too highly of ourselves –as to open ourselves up to manipulation.

When it comes to our relationship with God and how we feel about ourselves –as I discussed above– we have been reinforced by the world to feel good about who we are, primarily because the world doesn’t want any revolutionaries rocking the boat. Because we don’t feel too bad about the way that things are going (and that’s the way they want it), we also don’t necessarily feel that we are in need of a savior.

But, it’s even more personal than that.

When I am able to downplay the things that I do that are wrong, and I am able to overemphasize certain menial aspects of my personality/character/skill set/etc. that I believe to be praiseworthy, then I feel better about myself than I ought to.

Now, before everyone enters into self-flagellation, which I don’t condone, let’s not go to extremes. People are broken, every last one of us. The best person that you’ve ever known is/was a broken person, with faults, inabilities, and sins that you may or may not have known about. Conversely, the worst person that you’ve ever known falls in the same category – broken. But, looking at others isn’t where it’s at. Most people will look at others in an attempt to make themselves feel better (when they look at the worst people around) or in an attempt to find something to aspire to (when they look at the best people they can find).

Either of these approaches has its extremist positions, which are to be avoided.

Instead, of spending so much time looking at each other and who’s doing what and which individual is to blame for what particular calamity and how do I rate compared to the people in my life –instead of doing these pointless things– I would like to suggest that we do something else.

We can get our esteem from the best place to go for esteem.

There is a God who loves each of us. We can get our self-esteem from that fact. Do I need the people that I work with to think very highly of me?

Nope. My God loves me.

Should I think so little of myself, just as the world would have it?

Nope. My God loves me.

If you’ve come to buy what the world is selling, if you’re going to let the world determine how you feel about yourself, if you’re complacent with being manipulated by powers that need you to buy their snake oil or to stay seated and stop rocking the boat, well then, congratulations. You’ve outgrown your need for God.

Which is to say that you’ve not outgrown anything. You’ve just switched out the one true God and replaced Him with the deceptions of mankind.