So God loves us but doesn't need us. With that idea as the basis for viewing ourselves we go on to the next relationship: that with our fellow man.
How are we to view ourselves in relation to others? We certainly SHOULDN'T view ourselves towards them the same way we view ourselves towards God. This is a great ploy of the Enemy, to take that natural understanding of what we are and aren't to God and attempt to apply it to man. Of course, all sin is that way. All sin takes something that is good and uses it at the wrong time or in the wrong place. This sin, the sin of self-deprivation (low self-esteem if you will), attempts to take the natural feelings that we have towards God and twists them to become our feelings towards man; feelings that they don't need us.
So how are we to feel towards these fellow actors on life's stage? As with our relationship to God, this involves a balance between two distinct ideas which we will tackle separately.
We must understand who we are. What God truly has given us. Now make no mistake, we are fallen creatures, and will destroy all around us if given the chance. But that is our old nature. God has given us a new nature: one of healing instead of hurting, creation instead of destruction, life instead of death, loving instead of despising. This is who we should have been if we hadn't fallen, if sin hadn't entered the world. None of the greatest of saints has ever reached their FULL potential, and neither will we. Our life's work should be to get as close as we can.
In fact, none, save One, has ever truly reached the heights that God can bring a man, and that One is Jesus. I think we greatly undervalue the statement, we are to BE like Christ. Of course, as Christians we hear that phrase used constantly, but have we grown deaf to its abundance of meaning? We think it means to love like Christ, and well we should. But isn't there something deeper? Christ affected every single person He every met by radically improving the lives of all those who would allow Him. Some people today disbelieve of His very existence, yet we still celebrate His birthday two thousand years later. That, my friend, is the epitome of the word 'influence'.
Of course, not all saints of God will be world renown. I am not here preaching a 'health and wealth' gospel. Dedication to Christ does not naturally lead to fame, but it does naturally lead to influence. To truly be a source of light and joy and peace IS to change lives, and all those who dedicate themselves FULLY to Christ will have such influence. Their very presence will do so. They cannot help but do so.
This is our potential, but only in an ambiguous way. Let me be as specific as I can in such a general forum. I much more like telling individuals the details that I see in them, but this attempted 'precise vagueness' will have to do.
You were made by the CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE. You were indeed created, but more precisely, you were designed. You were designed by the same Designer that created the intricacies of nature. The same Designer that made the complexities of the DNA code, the beauty of a sunset; the subtle conjunction of myriads of laws all woven together to make a universe that is both simple yet complex, beautiful yet strange, predictable yet surprising. This great Architect of the universe made you specifically. This Being that has a million years to work on the marvel that is one atom, has told you that you, being a human, are the height of all His creation. It is much like being designed by a group of the greatest engineers of all time, who could all live forever working on the smallest part of the tiniest corner that makes up you.
Every part of you is there for a reason. The strengths, the weakness, ALL designed by the greatest Inventor ever. He has made you unique among the billions, someone different from all that ever were and all that ever will be. No one and nothing in the entire universe is like you. You are, by definition, 'special'. You cannot be replaced or duplicated. If you do not become who God has meant for you to be, then the light which you were meant to shine will never grace human history. That beauty will never be seen. And all humanity will suffer for it.
But all that is gone; what God has created you to be was destroyed by sin. The work of art has been defaced, the elegance has faded. However, hope is not yet lost. This radiant brilliance, this unparalleled marvel that was to be you, can be restored; the beauty returned and the ugliness erased, but only through Christ. Christ alone can repair the damage and bring back all that was and is no more. He can reset the clock on what that has been lost.
Never commit the sin, the travesty, of telling God that you have no talents, nothing that could help others, that you are indeed nothing to your fellow man. That is a slap in the face to an omniscient and omnipotent being, who has told you differently. It is an insult to Christ, who paid a tremendous price so that you can have yourself back, so that you could be all that God meant for you to be: a truly unique individual, capable of more strength and beauty, love and power, than you ever dreamed possible.
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