God's Word Trumps Our Mistakes!

I make a lot of mistakes.  We all do.  Some of my mistakes could just be classified as unwise ways of responding to life, while others are actually sins because they are choices to go against God’s will.  No matter what the source of our mistakes, they all have one thing in common: they are Satan’s playground for assaulting our self-esteem.  He likes nothing better than to use our own mistakes, as well as the actions of other people in our lives, to make us feel unworthy, insignificant, or ordinary.  The result is usually low self-esteem, depression, or both. 

But, as with most areas of our lives, focusing on ourselves or our daily circumstances and trusting God don’t naturally work together.  It is imperative that we look at God’s Word to find out what God’s thoughts toward us are so that we can focus on those thoughts and effectively overcome the enemy’s assaults on our own thoughts.  Romans 12:3 says it this way: “The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him” (MSG). 

When we are inundated with doubt and other negative thoughts about ourselves from Satan and our mistakes, we must choose to believe what God thinks about us and recognize what he has done and is doing on our behalf.  It is important for us to remember what the Bible teaches us about God’s thoughts toward us in order to combat the attacks from the enemy on our self-esteem.  First of all, God created us in his own image (Genesis 1:26-27), so God’s character goes into the creation of every person.  God has bestowed high dignity on humans, and to question our worth is to question God’s work.  God also loves each of us enough to send his Son as a sacrifice to bring us back into relationship with him.  This perfect love also expresses itself in actions like kindness, patience, forgiveness, and the gift of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

I have learned through my own experiences with low self-esteem, guilt, and depression that, whenever we make mistakes and Satan assaults our self-esteem, we have to choose to climb out of our own feelings and base our outlook only on God’s thoughts toward us.  Let’s agree to approach our mistakes in a new way: by telling Satan where to go and backing it up with the truth from God’s Word!