The Death of Self-Esteem
Romans 12:3-8
June 14, 2009
Truth calls for personal response. Always. God does not give us His Word that we might receive it as mere information, add it to our knowledge inventory, and walk away unmoved. And so Paul prefaces his detailed instruction with the general charge we studied last week, a charge to present ourselves to God as “living sacrifices”, not allowing ourselves to take our cues from this world or to be conformed to its image, but rather to be transformed by having our minds made new, in order that we might understand and live according to God’s will for the entire scope of our lives. This is God’s will; now Paul fleshes it out.
Paul has begun his appeal by talking about our minds; how do we perceive God, others, and all of life itself; what do we think? We will ultimately act in keeping with our most deeply-held beliefs; a good check on our actual beliefs is our actions: what do we actually do when faced with the choices of life? And so when we come to verse 3, the beginning of what we might call Paul’s “detailed instructions”, it is not surprising that he tells us how we ought to think—and then how we ought to act on the basis of how we think.
Paul’s first point is to instruct us
I. How to Think about Ourselves – :3
Boy, do we like to think about—and talk about—and concern ourselves with—ourselves. The self has become our national preoccupation, it would seem. Paul has some serious things to say about what we think of us. He says first that we ought to think
A. Not more highly than we ought
Saint Chuck Swindoll tells the story of a club that a few boys had assembled in their backyard, and the boys were negotiating the rules for membership. After the dust had cleared, the boys had addressed the problem of bragging with the following three rules:
1. Nobody act too big.
2. Nobody act too small.
3. Everybody act medium.
“Acting medium” might sound about right, but before we get to actions, we have to address thinking, and Paul says that our problem is thinking too much of ourselves. This is a consistent problem addressed by Jesus and the writers of Scripture—though you’d be hard-pressed to know it by listening to contemporary society, and even by listening to certain churches and preachers! If we are the kind of people who can with our hearts sing the praises of God as enumerated by Paul in Romans 11:33-36, we will then be the kind of people who are primed not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought.
But try telling this to contemporary America. The self-esteem movement has been pushed so successfully in our public schools since the 1980s that most Americans simply take it as axiomatic that promoting self-esteem to our young people is a good thing. We’ve gotten used to praising every little thing, no matter if that thing is praiseworthy or no.
How does Paul answer our contemporary American narcissism? “Don’t think more highly of yourself than you ought to.” Paul understands so clearly what the contemporary self-esteem advocates miss: our problem isn’t that we think too little of ourselves, but that we think too highly of ourselves.
Further, Paul tells us in Philippians 2 that we need to “esteem others as better than ourselves”. Self-esteem dies a well-deserved death when “Christ-esteem” and “others esteem” take priority in our own lives. Next, we ought to think
B. With sober judgment
What’s the appropriate way to think of ourselves? “With sober judgment”, Paul answers. Jesus, in addressing the Pharisees and Jewish leaders, did not tell them, as our popular notion of Jesus today would suggest, not to judge—but rather, He told them to “judge with righteous judgment”. It is to make judgments and determinations in accordance with things as they really are, not with prejudice, nor with favoritism. Third,
C. According to the measure of faith
This is a bit of a difficult phrase to translate with absolute certainty, and commentators are divided as to its meaning. It is likely that it is closely related to “in proportion to faith” (:6). As we believe God and act in accordance with our faith, we will come to see ourselves more clearly as we really are—and by the way, while I might emphasize that by nature we are desperately sinful, it’s also true that when we see ourselves with “sober judgment”, we’ll see that we are children of God because of grace, fully, finally, completely forgiven.
The first evidence of our minds being renewed ought to be a never-perfect, but ever-increasing understanding of who we are. Next,
II. How to Think about the Church – :4-5
A. The Unity of the Body
We live out Romans 12:1-2 in the context of a community. Any other way for a Christian to attempt to live out these verses is sub-Christian. Paul uses one of his favorite analogies to describe the church. And notice that the word isn’t that we are “like one body”, but that we are one body. I don’t think Paul is using an analogy here; I think he is speaking quite literally. If this sounds foreign to our thinking, it’s because our teaching has been deficient on this critical point.
What is the basis of the unity of the body? Paul says that the church is “the body of Christ” (Eph. 1:23; 5:23, 30; Colossians 1:24). We as believers are “in Christ”; everyone who believes in Christ is “in Him”. We are the one body of Christ!
B. The Diversity of the Body
At the same time a body is a unity, it has many different functioning parts. The parts internal and external need each other for the body to be whole. We all do not have the same function—but we all have a function. Keep that thought in mind…
C. The Mutuality of the Members of the Body
The very word “members”, which we see here, is a word that comes from the Bible, and whose first usage was to body parts. We don’t think in those terms; we think of being “members” of an organization, like the Kiwanis or the YMCA or the FFA. But that is backwards thinking, I’ve learned in my study; a “member” is a body part; culture stole the word from the church, vested it with its own meaning, and then handed it back to the church, to such a degree that what “member” means in the vast majority of churches is more akin to being part of an organization than it is to being a functioning organ in a body. That is categorically not the Bible’s idea of membership! Recognize, please, that being a member always ought to connote, not only belonging, but functioning.
III. How to Bring the Two Together – :6-8
Paul gives us the way to bring together a mind that is thinking rightly about ourselves and our spiritual gifts, and the church of which faithful Christians must be an active part:
We bring the two together when we use what God has given us to serve others.
These are gifts of God’s grace to us. God didn’t give us the gifts He gave us so that we could hoard them to ourselves, but rather so that we could use them in service to each other. This passage, as John MacArthur points out, “utterly destroys the notion that a Christian can be committed to Christ but be inactive in His service, that he can love the Lord but not obey the Lord, that he can be surrendered to the Lord but not minister for the Lord. True worship cannot be divorced from service.” Chew on that a spell…
Paul then gives a representative list of some of the different spiritual gifts active in the church. A “spiritual gift” is something that is, by Scriptural definition, a supernatural endowment given to individual believers. They are distinct from natural talents, though they may build upon them, may use natural talents as “launching pads”, as it were.
Several years ago I was invited to speak at our district conference in Ohio, and my subject was the importance of the involvement of every church in our district in some form or fashion in district affairs. My theme was this: rather than asking, “what’s in it for me”, as a church, there was a more Christian way to approach that question. When I consider my involvement in a church, my attitude isn’t first, “what’s in it for me”, but my attitude ought to be, “what’s in it for him?” What’s in it for _____________ that you are here and part of this body? Is that revolutionary? It sounds so odd in our narcissistic age, when we have grown accustomed to scheduling our lives around making sure our needs are met, to suggest that the point of life as a Christian, and the point of church, is about more than getting my needs met, satisfying my personal whims, catering to me—and yet, that’s exactly the Christian idea: I exist for the good of others; my church exists to serve others.
Very briefly, we’ll consider Paul’s list, but I am more interested today in the forest than the trees—as I think Paul is here as well—and so while we tackle each of these quickly, let’s not lose sight of the broader picture:
:6 – Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them:
• if prophecy, in proportion to our faith;
The idea here is simply “speaking forth”, not “foretelling” so much as “forth-telling”, if you will. The gift of prophecy involves being a public spokesperson for God, to instruct, encourage, challenge, correct, and comfort believers. The purpose of prophecy is always to exalt Jesus.
• if service, in our serving;
The word here is “diakonia”, from which we get our word “deacon”. This might pertain to the administration of taking care of the needs of the needy; some translations render the word “administration”, in fact.
• the one who teaches, in his teaching;
In the early church, a prophet was distinguished from a teacher by virtue of the source of his proclamation. The one who has the gift of teaching must do so in the power of the Spirit, exercising the gift as God designed.
• the one who exhorts, in his exhortation;
“Encouraging” might be a better term here, though the terms are very closely-related. Both nuances have the sense of using to build up another person; neither sense is negative, though “exhortation” might involve saying some hard things. Hebrews 10:24-25 speaks of “considering one another to stimulate one another to good deeds”, as well as “encouraging one another”.
• the one who contributes, in generosity;
This speaks of the person who gives to others privately, not as an expression of the corporate body of the church. “Don’t be a cheapskate giver” is the general admonition of Scripture, but particularly for the one whose spiritual gift is the desire and ability to give very freely. This person doesn’t merely give stuff or money, but gives himself to the Lord first, and then to others.
• the one who leads, with zeal;
Those who lead, who are responsible for the governance of the church, do so with appropriate zeal and diligence for the task at hand.
• the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
This refers to the generally spontaneous service of ministering to the needs of the poor and needy.
God doesn’t give you anything He gives you in order that you may keep it for yourself!
• Christian hospitality? Using the home God has blessed you with in order to bless others
• Money? You don’t own it; you are a steward of it
Now Paul has given us a list of 7 representative gifts, and the basic gist of what he’s saying is that once we understand how to think rightly about ourselves and the church, it’s incumbent upon us to do something about it, and that “something” is to serve others.
Here’s the thing: this is what we as a church need pretty significantly. What is your area of ministry? How are you actively contributing to the health of the body, and/or to ministry that reaches out to others in the community? Whether it’s in this community or another, in the months to come, we need, as a church, to accent this fact: God has given us gifts that we must share with others. Will you join me in praying—and working—toward that end?
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