GYC 2009: unASHAMED

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Alan & Nicole Parker: Love Me, Love Me Not

Nicole Parker

I Love Me, I Love Me Not, Part 1: Why Self-esteem Will Never Satisfy

All right, well, my name is Nicole Parker, and I'm just going to go ahead and have a prayer and get started, if that's all right with you.

I know there are still a few people trickling in, but that's fine.

Father in heaven, I know that each 1 of us is struggling to get closer to you.

We love you Lord, we want to experience your love and I just pray that you will bless this room, bless every single person here, Lord.

Help me to have the right words to speak that will apply to every single heart.

Send your spirit to sustain us, to open our minds, drive away the forces of darkness, and make a wall of fire around this room, Lord, that your Holy Spirit may be the only 1 that can influence us.

Thank you for being willing to use even me.

This seminar is coming out of my own experience.

I know some of you pretty well and some of you not so well And some of you not at all, but the Lord knows every 1 of you and I'm sure that you can find some applications of This message to your own experience.

I'm going to start out by sharing just a little bit of who I am as a person Growing up.

I I battled with depression as long as I can remember.

It was just a part of my life growing up.

I remember talking to my grandma when I was 12 years old about how much I wanted to die.

And just Life for me was always a battle.

I have 3 sisters and we grew up out in the country.

And in many ways, it was just heaven on earth.

We played outside all the time in the creeks and the fields and streams all over the place nearby our house.

I just love to go out in the woods and it was just my place to find peace and to be able to connect with God in some way.

I grew up going to Seventh-day Adventist church.

Every week we went to church, I went to Adventist school, but somehow I could never get past that battle of not liking who I was.

My sisters were so good at painting and singing and gymnastics and everything And I just felt like I was a klutz.

I felt like I was huge I I was actually the tallest of my sisters, but I just felt so tall even though I'm only 5 7 So I would walk hunched over and they were so popular.

I'm sure my perspective was somewhat biased by my own experience.

But To me, I felt like I didn't have any talents, abilities, there was nothing special whatsoever about me.

And you know the problem is our culture is largely based on you have to be special.

That's why self-esteem is such a big thing.

Now self-esteem isn't something you would have heard about a whole lot 30 years ago.

It really started at the self-esteem movement took off in about 1986.

Some people in California, educators, had started realizing as they talked with young people, these kids don't feel loved.

And so they came up with the magical solution, ah, if we can make them feel good about themselves, we'll be able to quell this epidemic of violence and teen pregnancy and all the drugs, all that, as long as they feel good about themselves, then everything will be great.

That's a humanistic perspective, by the way, in case you notice there's nothing about God in there.

But that was the solution that these educators came up with and California legislators caught on and soon they started this whole movement, we're going to build self-esteem based education.

And so the American school system started pumping this out, especially in California, but of course whatever starts in California goes all over, right?

So They established the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.

And this was the beginning of the self-esteem solution to all of our problems.

Now, self-esteem, if you simply define it, I looked up several definitions.

In psychology, Self-esteem reflects a person's overall evaluation or appraisal of his or her own worth.

Or more simply, how you feel about yourself, a feeling of pride in yourself, or satisfaction with oneself.

So you can see, self-esteem is a very basic concept.

How you feel about yourself being based on what other people think is the important way to look at things.

The popular perspective on self-esteem is you can never have too much self-esteem.

I have a shirt actually that I bought it and I looked in the label and the back of it and the label of it says you can never have too much self-esteem.

And I was like, wow, what a biblical perspective.

Have you ever known anybody who had too much self-esteem?

Have you known somebody who really thinks a lot of themselves?

He told the same stories about himself all the time.

How he was so good at skateboarding, and he used to have his hair down to here, and he used to have a ring in his nose, and a ring in his ear, and a chain between the 2.

And I was like, hey, I wouldn't want to get in a fight.

But these were the things that he talked about.

He had lots of self-esteem, but I'm afraid it was a little too much.

You can have too much self-esteem, especially if it's based on things like that.

The problem with self-esteem in this perspective is that it has become the solution to the world's problems.

Not the cross, not knowing God and having a relationship with him, it's having self-esteem.

It's this humanistic perspective and you hear it everywhere.

On Sesame Street, did you ever hear the song they sing, the most important person in the whole wide world is you and you hardly even know you.

These are the kinds of messages that kids are getting pumped with from the very earliest years.

You know, the little train that could, there's not a mountain that we can't climb, There's not a river we can't make it over.

With all the willpower in you, can you march out to the parking lot and pick up a car?

And barring a miracle, there are some things that no person should even try to do.

But in our world, we have this illusion, especially based on our culture.

You know, generations in the past did not have to deal with what we have to deal with.

Have any of you ever read Little House on the Prairie?

They plant everything in the ground, work really hard, and then along would come a drought or a storm or something, sweep it all away.

They woke up in the morning and they went out to see what the weather was like.

If somebody had to go to town to get supplies, he went.

People didn't have the illusion of having control over their whole lives back then, because they had control over so little.

Now, we feel a little chilly, so we go and adjust the thermostat.

We get in the car, ooh, it's cold in here, but it's okay, because in 10 minutes it'll be warm, right?

I Love Me, I Love Me Not, Part 2: Discovering Your Worth in God’s Eyes

If anybody can move up toward the front or at least in from the aisle, so you can leave more seats for the other people who come in late.

It seems like some people always end up crowded into the back, unable to come in.

So if anybody can move up here a little bit more toward the front, fill up some of the front and move in from the sides, that would be great.

I don't know what to do, but I'm suffering with you, believe me.

Alright, well let's get started with prayer.

Father in heaven, we're just asking for you to fill us with a sense of your love for us.

I pray that you will speak through my voice to every heart here.

You know the hurts going on in our lives, Lord.

You know the pain, the questions, you know the struggles that we're facing.

And I know you have the solution to every single 1 of them and you want to communicate it to us.

Help us to understand your word in a new way this morning.

We just talked about, for those of you who are new here, we just talked about what's wrong with the world's way of measuring your worth.

And I want to share a little bit of my own personal story, just like I did in the last session.

You know, when I hear people talk about, oh, I just wish I could go back and be young again, I just, like, whatever.

I don't know what they're talking about, because you couldn't pay me enough money to go back to being 16.

But, you know, at that time in my life, I just really hated who I was.

You know, I wore size large cream-colored turtlenecks all the time.

It was actually many years before I discovered I was a size small.

At that time I was about 10 pounds or 15 pounds less than I am now.

So at 5'7", and let's see, I was 115 or 120 pounds at the time, there wasn't a whole lot to me.

I just felt like this huge buffalo, this camel of a girl that stomped around, tripping over her feet.

I just, I totally hated what I looked like, how I felt.

I liked when I started being into the more conservative world because everybody wore skirts down to their ankles and at least nobody could see my ugly legs, my ugly body.

And 1 of the things that I hated the most about myself was how tall I was.

I remember when I was 20 years old, I was cold porting my first summer canvassing program and I was thinking as I often did how much I hated my body, how much I hated what I looked like and how tall I was and I started thinking I wonder what would be the ideal height.

So I thought let me just look around and find somebody who's their ideal height.

I looked around and I saw another girl and just thought you know that's about the right height.

She looked just about, you know, perfect.

I wonder how much taller than the ideal I am, you know?

So I went over and I stood next to her and we were the same height.

You know, What that teaches me is that perception is not always reality.

I'm not going to promise you that if you don't like the way you look that you're going to someday find out that you're just perfect, but I learned something more important, that I had been beating myself all the time over how I hated the way God had made me.

And I actually was completely misperceiving how God had made me.

Not that, you know, it really mattered what I looked like, because what we look like really isn't a measure of our worth.

But at that time, I had this consuming desire to be different.

I used to think, what if I were just going to put my name into a drop box and say, OK, choose 1 out.

And whatever you get, you're going to get this whole new body and face.

Would I be willing to just take the risk and see if I could get something better than what I have, I'd think about these things.

You know, when you're a teenager, you think about dumb things sometimes.

At this time in my life, I really disliked who I was.

And I was resentful toward God sometimes too.

Why did you make me this and that, oily hair, and too much acne, and everything was just always wrong, wrong, wrong with me.

Sometimes the difference between women and men is the way that we lie to ourselves.

Women see themselves with their perceptions distorted and men sometimes do too.

Whether we're lying to ourselves with getting higher self-esteem than we should or a lower self-esteem than we should.

It's all ultimately the wrong way to measure ourselves.

In our last seminar we talked about the difference between worldly self-esteem and godly self-worth.

The truth is worldly self-esteem is a sandy foundation of evaluating human worth by relationships, talents, accomplishments, or other worldly measurements apart from the love of God.

Worldly self-esteem is this false gospel that'll tell you, yeah, you can really be worth a lot if you'll just succeed, if you'll just become popular enough, if you'll just whatever.

But biblical self-worth is a rock-solid foundation built on the unconditional love of God as expressed in creation and redemption.

The love of God tells me that there is nothing I can do that can make him love me more.

There's nothing I can do that can increase my worth in his eyes.

And there's nothing I can do that can make me worth less.

There's nothing that I can do that can reduce my worth in his eyes.

This concept is throughout the Bible and yet So few Christians really have internalized it.

Instead, we build our self-worth on what other people think of us.

You know, and I know so many people that they're like squirrels in the woods.

They won't leave this relationship until they're pretty sure they can make it to the next 1.

Take a flying leap and, you know, they're still letting go of this 1 when they're hanging on to that 1.

You know, the proverbial text message breakup.

It's just, It's a prevailing culture right now because we have this craving, this need for affection from other people.

And it comes from not building a deep sense of identity and the love of God for us.

When I see people who are in addictive relationships, I know what's going on behind the scenes.

I know that what's happening is they're supplementing, substituting because God feels so far away.

They need somebody to make them feel good about themselves now, here, I'll get to God.

Maybe this will be something that will help me.

But self is still on the throne of our hearts.

And when self is on the throne of our hearts, we're very poor judges of what choices we should make in life.

I've known people who they swing from relationship to relationship, or from sport to sport, or from 1 thing to another.

They'll build their self-worth on their grades for a while, or then that they're good at something, or then they'll try to be really popular, or then they'll get into I'm really outdoorsy, or then they'll get into I'm just a really artsy person.

But all of the things that they're going to are ultimately, they get tired of it.

It's empty because it's not really a foundation for godly self-worth.

Healing the Hurting Heart, Part 1

Father in heaven, we come before you as a group of people, but you know each 1 of our individual hearts, Lord.

There's so much hurt packed into this room, and each 1 of us has our own story, Lord.

I don't know the stories, but you do, and I pray that you will help each 1 of us to see how your word applies to the things that have gone on in our lives, the things that hold us back, the chains that bind us from being able to truly experience your love.

We pray that you will open our minds and our hearts that we may be able to understand your love in a deeper and more powerful way than ever before.

This is I Love Me, I Love Me Not, Part 3.

But I'm starting the topic of healing the hurting heart.

How many of you were here for 1 or both of the seminars this morning?

Okay, so some of you have got a fair idea of what I'm talking about here.

In a nutshell, what I talked about this morning is that the world tells you you've got to be beautiful or perfect or good at something or loved by somebody in order to be worthwhile, valuable, and loved.

And the Bible tells us that God loves us immeasurably.

So we have to figure out how to internalize that love of God.

But the reality is most of us have things that hold us back from really being able to understand God's love.

We know He loves us, yeah, yeah, yeah, God loves me.

But what does that really do to when I'm hurting?

To the things that I'm naturally drawn to, that I feel I can't live without.

I'm going to tell you about a young man who came to me not long ago.

Great looking, had a beautiful girlfriend, everything looked great, but his life behind the scenes was falling apart.

His father had died when he was a boy and his mother had taken out a lot of her frustrations on him.

She chose him out of his siblings and actually would just be mean to him.

She would physically be violent toward him, express her anger toward him, neglect him, abuse him.

And now, as an adult, he found himself still battling with the same feelings that he felt as a little boy.

The same overwhelming emotions, the things that kept him back from being happy as a little boy were now still with him.

No, he wasn't under his mother's control anymore, but practically, those chains were still binding him.

They were still holding him back from freedom in Christ.

He was trying to do all the right things.

And he came to me just saying, you know, I'm trying, I'm trying to build a relationship with God.

I'm doing everything I know, and it's not working.

So I started talking with him about what were the root issues going on in his life.

What did he turn to to make him feel good when he didn't feel good anymore?

And it was hard for him to figure it out.

You know, very often when we're going to the broken cisterns of the world, we keep wondering, what is it that's holding me back?

Why am I not feeling happy and successful and fulfilled?

But it's because we aren't truly experiencing the love of God in a way that impacts on the deep places of our hearts.

And you know, we actually are a country that's full of this problem.

You know, in our country, you would think, you know, looking from other countries' perspectives, it's like, wow, if you live in America, you have clean water, it just, you turn on the faucet and there it is.

You can take a hot bath, you've got hot and cold water, wow, you know.

You can just change your thermostat, you can Go get any kind of entertainment you want.

Just run down to the DVD store, buy something at the music store, whatever you want.

We've got clothes, comfort, entertainment, food, everything we need.

Major depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States.

Antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the United States.

We are a profoundly unhappy country because many people, just like this little boy, have never figured out what it is that's going on in my heart that holds me back from being able to experience the love of God like I should.

And of course there are many people who don't even try, they don't go to church, they're not into God, all of that.

But I don't think that those of us in this audience are for the most part from that group.

I would say there are 3 categories of things that hurt us.

The Number 1 is sins that are committed against us.

The second 1 would be sins that we commit ourselves.

And the third is the simple results of living in a sinful world.

You know, there are just things that happen, diseases, death, things that none of us can control that just seem to happen, natural disasters.

These cause so much pain, but there's very little control that we have over them.

I'm going to talk in this seminar primarily about sins that are committed against us and how do we heal from those.

And the next session I'm going to be talking about how to deal with the sins that we have committed, how to heal from those mistakes and find hope and comfort to deal with those pains, those heartaches that come to us.

And the results of living in a sinful world, the same principles apply to dealing with those.

Series

Alan & Nicole Parker: Love Me, Love Me Not

I Love Me, I Love Me Not, Part 1: Why Self-esteem Will Never Satisfy

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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