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February 23 - March 2, 2015
The most radical treatment for the fear of man is the fear of the Lord. God must be bigger to you than people are.
Therefore, there are two ways that we can become naked. The first is the self-imposed nakedness that is due to our sinful nature and our personal sin. The second is other-imposed nakedness that we experience because of the sin of other people. Unfortunately, this victimization-shame feels identical to the shame we feel from our own sin, even though the cause is very different. Victims feel embarrassment, humiliation, and disgrace because of the sins of others against them. They feel unclean, naked, and without access to covering. They feel as if they are under the all-knowing gaze of others,
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Low self-esteem is a pop version of biblical shame or nakedness. It is secularized shame.
Doesn’t the teaching on self-esteem and its emphasis on self seem to make the problem worse?
Don’t we do children a disservice by showering them with unearned approval? The self-respect the schools are seeking to bestow comes only as a person develops a growing ability to meet difficult tasks, risk failure, and overcome obstacles. You can’t simply confer self-esteem upon another person. To assume that other people can control our view of ourselves is what creates low self-esteem in the first place!
The problem is that we really are not okay. There is no reason why we should feel great about ourselves. We truly are deficient. The meager props of the self-esteem teaching will eventually collapse as people realize that their problem is much deeper. The problem is, in part, our nakedness before God.
Low self-esteem usually means that I think too highly of myself.
Sometimes we would prefer to die for Jesus than to live for him. If someone had the power to kill us for our profession of faith, I imagine that most Christians would say, “Yes, I am a believer in Jesus Christ,” even if it meant death. The threat of torture might make people think twice, but I think most Christians would acknowledge Christ. However, if making a decision for Jesus means that we might spend years being unpopular, ignored, poor, or criticized, then there are masses of Christians who temporarily put their faith on the shelf.
Aren’t the most popular mission trips the ones that take us far from our own neighborhood? Russia is easy; our own neighborhood is a constant challenge.
What is it that shame-fear and rejection-fear have in common? To use a biblical image, they both indicate that people are our favorite idol. We exalt them and their perceived power above God.
But people are our idol of choice.
They are worshipped because we perceive that they have power to give us something. We think they can bless us.
As in all idolatry, the idol we choose to worship soon owns us. The object we fear overcomes us. Although insignificant in itself, the idol becomes huge and rules us. It tells us how to think, what to feel, and how to act. It tells us what to wear, it tells us to laugh at the dirty joke, and it tells us to be frightened to death that we might have to get up in front of a group and say something. The whole strategy backfires. We never expect that using people to meet our desires leaves us enslaved to them.
The Bible never minimizes the effect of sinful words. It exposes them as firebrands that leave wounds that can go to the deepest parts of our being. They stand in stark contrast to the words of compassion and healing that the Lord offers to such victims.
“When I am afraid, I will trust in you. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mortal man do to me?”
The psalms of David often revolve around one question: Whom will I fear, God or people?
The fear of man is the sinful exaggeration of a normal experience.
The problem is when fear forgets God.
A second, more subtle reason Janet does not feel forgiven from this sin is that she confuses the shame from her sin with the shame from her victimization.
The clearest example is Jesus himself. He was sentenced to death in the most shameful manner possible — naked and on a cross. He felt shame, but he was innocent. He suffered the shame of others that was placed on him. This is the One on whom Janet must fix her eyes (Heb. 12:2). Then, instead of focusing on her works-righteous attempts to repay God for a sin that is not hers, she can focus her attention outside of herself, on who God is and what he says.
For every one look at myself I must take ten looks at Jesus.
One might think that an extensive study of the sovereign power of God would help Janet deal with this particular aspect of her fear of people. However, pictures of an enthroned God will not speak deeply to this fear of attack. Janet must know that the sovereign God is good.
For example, even though most self-esteem books indicate that it is something you can develop by yourself, almost all the books also say that one of the best ways to raise your self-esteem is to achieve some successes (which are then compared to what others do) or to surround yourself with people who affirm you (which leaves you dependent on their opinion).
We are morally good.
Emotions are the way to truth.
There was a time in my own life when I would “practice the presence of God”; then, when I felt his presence, I would pray. All went well until the day I didn’t feel his presence. I waited for hours, filled with tears, but I never felt The Presence. I tried to pray but I felt that both I and my prayers were in a hermetically sealed room. The Presence finally came the next day when I was asking for counsel from a good friend. His comment was simply this: “Why didn’t you just pray by faith?” He taught me one of the most important lessons of prayer: that prayer depended on God and his promises,
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All people are spiritual.
If you exalt the individual and make emotions the path to truth, then whatever you feel most strongly will be considered both good and necessary for growth.
If you “need” love (to feel okay about yourself), you will soon be controlled by the one who dispenses love.
Among all these uses of the word “need,” there are three different clusters of meaning: biological needs, spiritual needs, and psychological needs.
At first glance the Scripture can support the idea that we have a need to show love to others, but it is more difficult to find Scripture that says we have a God-given need to receive love so that we can feel better about ourselves. Where does the Bible talk about these needs?
The main reason why there is an epidemic of emptiness is that we have created and multiplied our needs, not God.6
God isn’t using our understanding of servants to suggest that he is like a servant. No, God is the servant, the husband, the father, thebrother, and the friend.
This promise is exciting only if we think corporately more than individually. Isaiah did not live to see the demise of Assyria, but the prophecy against it was a great comfort to him. He knew that he would not see the end of Assyrian rule, but he could rejoice that God’s people would flourish and God would be exalted.
When we think of ourselves as alone and isolated, we will always be prone to fear other people. Isolation and the fear of man are close companions. Yet when we truly understand that God has called us to participate in a larger family (i.e., the church), we are free.
C. S. Lewis indicated that if he wanted something easy and pain-free, he would have chosen a bottle of wine over Jesus.
one task in counseling is to begin to separate the real hurt from the pain that is amplified by our own lusts and longings.
