To Know your God is to Know your worth

“What is the price of five sparrows? A couple of pennies? Not much more than that. Yet God does not forget a single one of them.  And he knows the number of hairs on your head! Never fear, you are far more valuable to him than a whole flock of sparrows.Luke 12:6-7 Living Bible (TLB)

We are living in a time of crisis of self worth right now. I think living in a social media, comparative culture is part of it. I believe there is a loss of personal meaning that plays a role and a loss of knowing who we are and our value in the eyes of our Creator is the biggest hijaker of our sense of self worth.I see it prevaliant with teens I work with and it is heart breaking. And it is not only teens that suffer, there are adults questioning their own worth and trying many counterfeit ways to manufacture it.

We can't truly grow and transform until we recognize our God given worth. Knowing we are valuable, wanted, esteemed, treasured just on the basis of our being is the impetus to helping us find meaning in our life. Believing that we have intrinsic value outside of anything we acheive or accomplish gives us the motivation and the drive to shed all of the counterfiet means of worth and become what we were truly meant to be. A sense of self worth empowers us to effectively make a positive difference in the world, to be a light in the darkness.

And having a healthy sense of self worth should never be confused with narcissism or conceitedness. The need to posture to obtain applause, accolades and admiration are never based on a solid knowledge of worth. They are based on a continuous questioning of worth and a demand that others provide a supply of admiration to sooth a soul that struggles to feel value.

When we start to Know who we are and how very precious we are, we may have to break some long held false beliefs about ourselves. We may have to break some agreements we have made about who we believe ourselves to be that inform our lifestyle. And we nat beed tio examine negative tapes we play in our heads that want to tell us we are inconsequencial, or worse, worthless or a mistake. These beliefs can keep us stuck in unhealthy patterns and relationships and ineffective in our life.

In order to stop the noise of the tapes we need to replace them with what God says about us, who he says we are. We may even need to introduce ourselves to a God we never knew or a God who we knew all wrong. The Creator of every human being has made a way for us to know who He is, and He speaks to us of who we are. And He does that through His word, through His creation, through his people. We just have to be willing to listen and to let go of old beliefs, and unhealthy patterns that keep us stuck in those beliefs. It sounds easy, but sometimes even unhealthy beliefs can form our sense of identity and for some, the sense of identity can be a very scary thing to give up. So it's a challenge- Are we going to know our true selves, our true worth and live out of that? Or are we going to cling to the known, the familiar, maybe even the destructive, even if it does us no good. Our creator leaves it up to us to decide.

This post has been part of the five minute Friday writing community. A writing prompt given each Friday to write on for 5 minutes. Today was Worth.