As a student-athlete in high school, the only thing that I liked about myself was my basketball ability. My self-worth was based completely on my performance on the court. Although I knew Christ, it took a lot of painful losing and poor performances for me once I got to college to realize that my self-worth was very skewed.

After I began to read the Bible more, I realized that none of the verses showed that God loved me any less based on my performance. I did, however, find many verses based on how God viewed me as His child.

When we receive Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we begin to see that we are children of God, and that is enough. Our self-image, bad habits, weaknesses, poor performances, etc., have nothing to do with who we are or how God loves us. On the contrary, when we look down on ourselves, we actually hinder our relationship with Him. As Oswald Chambers says, “The way we continually talk about our own inability is an insult to the Creator.” When we tear ourselves down, we ultimately tell God that He did a pretty bad job of creating us.

We have two options in response to this. We can choose to go to God to show us who we are and reveal our true identity, or we can choose to go to others and the world to tell us who we are. Only one will bring peaceful truth.

Enjoy who God made you to be in Christ!