The Bestowing of Value
You can’t fix low personal value yourself.
I counselled a lady over an extended period of time who struggled with personal value. She saw herself as being worthless and a burden; as though she had nothing to offer. It came out in one of the counselling sessions early on, that she had this mantra that she would recite to herself hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day:
“I hate myself and I wish that I didn’t exist.”
On one occasion, I was ten minutes late for one of our sessions and, when she came into my office, she told me that while she was waiting she had recited this saying about once every 5 seconds.
Life was difficult for her. She felt as though she fell short of many of the standards that she had set for herself. In her darker moments, she despaired of ever being someone of value - in her eyes she deserved to not exist. That was the only right outcome. The pain of low personal value and shame was an ever-present reminder that she needed to find a solution to the problem.
The pain of shame motivates humanity to find ways to resolve it – but people foolishly try to do the ‘fixing’ themselves. You can see this in fall of humanity in Genesis 3. After turning away from God, Adam and Eve found themselves in trouble and went about finding a way to conceal what they’d done.
In their case, the resolution that they employed was to find something to hide behind – something that would cover the feeling that they were not good enough. They were created to derive value from God Himself but the turning of their back towards God meant that they needed to find another source of value, another source of righteousness. And so they hid from each other, and even tried to hide from God, with leaves, bushes and excuses. Unfortunately for them, nothing they could do could restore the sense of value they’d had before they sinned.
There are only two sources for personal value – we can either derive it intrinsically or pursue it instrumentally.
Intrinsic value is when something has value just because it exists. Something with intrinsic value doesn’t need to draw value from anything else to be valuable. It just is. An example of this is health. Health is intrinsically valuable. Now health can help you to do other things, but it is valuable in itself. In contrast to this is instrumental value, where something only has value because of what you can do with it. Money is a good example of this. It has no value in and of itself but only in what you can do with it. As individuals we tend to either draw value intrinsically or instrumentally.
There have been many people over many years who have asserted that humans have intrinsic value. Some have connected it to God and others have tried to establish intrinsic human value independently of God.
Being made in the image of God bestows great value upon humanity - but it does so only when humanity stays connected with, and imaging, God.
Humanity does have intrinsic value but it is an intrinsic value that is derived in an ongoing way from God himself.
When humanity rejects being connected to God, the only other option is for them to derive value instrumentally. The result of this is we see people deriving value, not from God, but from what one owns, wears, says, does … etc. This is part of what we see happening in Jeremiah 9:23-24:
God rebukes Israel for boasting in who they are because of their strength, wisdom, and riches, and instead instructs the Israelites that they will only have something to boast about if they know God personally.
What would have happened to Adam and Eve if they hadn’t tried to deal with their shame on their own? (Genesis 3:7-13)
What if they’d come clean?
What if they’d gone to God in their shame and told him about the mess they were in, rather than staying stuck in it?
What would be different?
What help from God did they miss out on by choosing to rely on their own resourcefulness in their shame?
Whilst we may not have been as extreme in our self-hatred as the lady that I counselled, many of us have probably had moments when we could identify with her. We have all failed, felt significant displeasure with ourselves and a desire to melt away.