For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Romans1:21
So, to summarise the roots of poor self-image, there are three factors:
1. The Aftermath of Sin which results in brokenness: Birth-defects, natural disasters, and skew noses on the one side and relational breakdown on the other.
2. The Distorted Mirror of Society that sells our wants to us as needs and makes attractiveness an impossible standard that we exhaust ourselves trying to achieve.
3. The Filters of Past Pain that mute the positives and amplify the negatives.
Bizarrely enough all of this leads us away from God and to an obsession with self - but in the most negative sense. We spend way too much time, self-analysing, self-criticising, self-hating and self-destructing.
The further we move away from God, the more our hearts become dark and the more futile our thinking becomes. The route toward a better self-image is for us to get to know our Maker and Sustainer and allow Him to heal our brokenness, to clarify our distortions and to remove our filters.
He can, He does and He will.
We'll look at some key passages through the rest of this week.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
