Having a Healthy Faith Image
Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
When was the last time you compared yourself to someone else and found yourself, in your own mind at least, coming up short? “I’m just not good enough, or smart enough, or successful enough, or beautiful enough.”
That sort of self-talk, or self-image, is what all too often, rattles around inside our heads, because we live in a success oriented world. Beauty, brains and brawn – you have to have at least one of those, according to this world, to “make it”.
And when, in our heart of hearts, we feel as though we don’t measure up, if that’s the way we see ourselves, then it taints our whole world, our whole lives. Put simply, you can’t live a great life, if you have a cruddy self-image. It’s true, right?!
Now, self-image is not something that, at first blush, God’s Word seems to talk all that much about. But when you dig a bit deeper, you start discover that, in point of fact, that’s what it’s all about.
A lecturer of mine from years ago at Bible College – Barry Chant – one day taught me the difference between what the world refers to as “self-image”, and what God talks about, which is much more about having a “faith-image”.
What we think of ourselves matters. It matters a lot.
The problem with self-image, is the yardstick that we mostly use. We tend to listen to the advertisers who dangle images of success under our noses – images that we can never live up to – with the brand promise, that if we buy whatever they’re peddling, then we’ll be the person they say we should be.
It doesn’t work, have you noticed?
And we listen to the rest of the world, people who are often more interested in telling us how far we fall short, rather than how well we measure up. And pretty quickly, you come to the conclusion that you can never, ever measure up.
But when you start listening to what God says about you – man, it just blows your mind. Here’s just one thing – just one thing of many things – that He says about us. That indeed, He is saying right now, about you:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 1:3)
So, you have already been blessed, you are being blessed, you will continue to be blessed with every spiritual blessing. Nothing held back. Every blessing.
When you start wrapping your heart around who God says you are, what God says about you, when you start believing Him, over and above the world – when you replace your self-image with a faith-image, let me tell you, it’s a whole new ball game.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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