Biblical Self-Image
Can you stand in front of a mirror, and say "I really love myself." Try it sometime. How does it feel? Self-conscious? Conceited? False? But as Christians, it's something that we're commanded to say, and we're commanded to mean. Can you do it?
In both the Old and the New Testaments, God gives us the command to love our neighbours as ourselves; we've become very practiced and very focused on loving our neighbours, and maybe we might think we've got pretty good at that, at least from time to time. But we're not always so brilliant at loving ourselves.
Maybe it's because we don't think we're all that lovable. Oh, we know very well that God loves us, but He always seems to love us despite who we are, not because of it. That doesn't necessarily do wonders for our self-image either. And we can believe that God loves us, because that is His nature; He can't help loving us. I want to say today that the Bible goes beyond forcing God to love us; in fact, it says that God wants to love us, and He wants to love us because of who we are, and not despite it.
There are three areas in which we might think that we're unacceptable. We might think we're not such a great person physically, just in terms of what we look like. We might think that we're just not a great person at all, that we're just no use; we're unacceptable psychologically, if you like. Finally, and particularly for Christians, we feel that we are unacceptable spiritually; that we are such terrible sinners that we're never going to be able to have a close relationship with God. Maybe someday, when we're like the vicar, we can be pure enough for God to bother with us, but right now, God is so busy hating everything that we do that He really doesn't want to spend any time around us.
I want to challenge all these three views of self; I believe that the Bible has a very positive view of the human self. I look at the great Biblical figures - Joshua, David, Elijah, Paul - and I see people who are all right with themselves. Even Moses, who begins his ministry terrified and unable to speak, ends up a confident leader ruling over a nation of millions. We're going to take a bit of a tour of the Bible to look in more detail at each of these three areas, beginning with the physical image.
Physical
King David was one of the real heroes of the Old Testament. He was a warrior, a poet, and a great leader, although he did have some problems with women. The Bible tells us that he was red-faced and attractive, but also that he didn't look like a king - in I Samuel 16, when it came time for Samuel to anoint a king, Samuel thought that David's older brother looked more like a king. God had to tell Samuel that He was interested in David's heart, not in his looks.
In fact, David was left outside keeping the sheep while Samuel looked at his brothers. Normally the youngest son is the father's favourite; he stays in the house. You don't usually find the youngest son outside working in the fields while everyone else is at home. It sounds like his family almost forgot him while Samuel was there. "Are you sure you don't have any other sons?"
But it was this same David who wrote the amazing words in Psalm 139: "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well."
Despite his family situation, desite what people thought of him, here is a man who has no problems with his physical image - he knew that first and foremost he was God's creation. Does it sound cocky - to praise God because He made me? That's what David does here, and I think that far from being cocky, it's quite proper - David realises that, as it says in Genesis 1:27, he is made in the image of God. You can't have a proper understanding of the image of God unless you have a proper understanding of yourself - fearfully and wonderfully made, a wonderful work. Do you know that full well?
This new Bible I have been given has quotes from the Song of Songs on the cover; I'm not sure why, but here is another example of someone with a godly body image: the beloved in the Song of Songs can say (in 1:5) "I am dark but beautiful" and (in 2:1) "I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys." Why? Because she knows that she is loved. For the Christian, the Song of Songs is seen as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the church - that's you. The church should know that it is lovely because it is loved.
I know that physical self-image can be a big struggle for some people, and I know that if you are having problems with your image, listening to this sermon is not going to clear it up. Afterwards we can pray for you, and pray that God will show you His image in you.
Psychological
But let's now look at our psychological self-image. The most difficult of Jesus' commandments for us is in Mark 12:31 - Jesus commands us to love our neighbour as ourselves. The logical implication of this is that we have to love ourselves. I would go so far as to say that it's impossible to love our neighbour if we don't love ourselves. If we don't love ourselves, we can't love our neighbour as ourselves. I've seen priests and missionaries who are so busy giving out to others that they don't take proper care of themselves, and so they burn out; it leaves them incapable of loving their neighbour any more.
Whether we feel like we should love ourselves or not is not in question here. Hopefully I've already suggested some reasons why we should; here are a few more.
For me personally, the most important encouragement about who I am comes in Romans 5:8: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Not because of what we have or haven't done, not because of whether or not we have pleased God, but because of who we are. We might not think we were worth it; Christ's death says that we were. For Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous to bring us to God, as it says in 1 Peter. He made that choice because we were worth it. You were worth it.
Spiritual
Thirdly, let's turn to our spiritual self-image; that is, our image of our relationship with God. When you think of your relationship with God, what words come to mind? "Close"? "Shame"? "Father"? "Judgement"? The way you see your relationship with God will affect the way you see yourself; it will have an effect on everything we've already talked about so far.
The fifth century Roman theologian Augustine described humanity as "a lump of sin, a universal mass of perdition". He said that we all have "a cruel necessity of sinning". Augustine's views were taken up by the Western Church right up until today, and the end result of them is that we have a tendency to think that nothing we do is good, hardly anything is neutral and pretty much everything we do is somehow a grave sin against God. If we have a "necessity of sinning" then it is impossible for us to do anything that God actually likes.
This is one tradition in the Church; the Eastern churches follow another tradition, much closer to the Jewish ideas of our relationship with God and closer to that idea in Genesis 1 that we are all made in the image of God. That image was lost in Adam, but regained in Christ. We are, as Cyril of Alexandria said, "made partakers of the divine nature and are said to be sons of God".
The tradition that we can not only actively not sin but even do the right thing is much stronger in the Bible than in the Western church. Noah was described as being "righteous and blameless". We have David saying in Psalm 26, "Judge me, O Lord, for I have walked in integrity." In Luke 1, Zacharias and Elizabeth are described as being "upright before God" - and all of these before Jesus came.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is Job. It took me a long time to understand the story of Job. Here was a man who was "blameless and upright", but for whom everything went wrong. He was visited by three good evangelicals, who told him that he needs to confess his sin, and be restored to God. But Job claims he didn't have any sin to confess. Now I couldn't accept this. I knew my memory verse of Romans 3:23, "all have sinned and falled short of the glory of God," and so I knew Job's friends must be right. How can he possibly claim that he is blameless?
The reason it took me so long to understand the story of Job is that the entire point of the story is that Job's friends were not right. Job really did not have any sin to confess. But here is the twist in the tale: it was neither sinning, nor not sinning, that determined what happened in Job's life.
Even Paul, in Phillipians 3, claims that he was blameless according to the Law. But, he says, simply not sinning is not what it's all about. You can not sin, but still not have a close relationship with God. Paul said that even though he was righteous because of his actions, they were "rubbish" because they did not lead him to knowing Christ. It was knowing Jesus that brought Paul into a living relationship with God, not what he did or did not do.
I am not denying the reality of sin. Sin is a problem that we need to deal with, and I praise God that He has provided Jesus as a way to deal with it. But it is dealt with, and this means is that our sin is not the only terms on which we relate to God. You are not your sin. There is, hopefully, more to you than what you do wrong. God wants to relate to you, as a person.
And more than that - He wants to call you a friend. In James, it says that Abraham believed God, it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called a friend of God. Jesus, the very representation of God with us, says in John 15 that his disciples are no longer servants, but friends. But so often we have a tendency to live not as friends but as servants.
Even missionaries - maybe particularly missionaries - can fall into the trap of seeing God as a distant master, and not as a friend. Here is what one missionary, Joseph Cook, wrote about God:
I invented an impossible God whose demands of me were so high and whose opinion of me was so low that there was no way for me to live except under his frown. All day long he nagged me: "We don't you pray more? Why don't you witness more? When will you ever learn self-discipline? How could you allow yourself to indulge in such wicked thoughts? Do this! Don't do that! Yield! Confess! Work harder!"
God was always using his love against me. He'd show me his nail-pierced hands and look at me glaringly, and say, "Why aren't you a better Christian? Get busy, and live the way you ought to!" Most of all, I had a God who, deep down, considered me less than dirt. Oh, he'd make a great to-do about loving me, but I believed that the day-to-day acceptance that I longed for could only be mine if I let him crush everything that was really me. When it came down to it, there was scarcely a thought, or a feeling, or a decision of mine that God really liked.
It's no wonder that this man retired early from the mission field after a nervous breakdown. He lived as God's servant and not as God's friend. The way he related to God shaped the way he related to himself; if he truly thought that God did not really like him, how could he possibly love himself?
If only he had known that God liked him - really liked him - accepted his person and his personality, that God saw His own image in Dr Cook, maybe Dr Cook would have seen God's image in himself as well. I pray that each one of us would be able to do the same.