CONTENTS

• JUST VISITING
• FEATURE STUDY: THE PROBLEM OF INFERIORITY

JUST VISITING

"One afternoon an extremely popular opera was scheduled for performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. A famous tenor was to sing, and every seat was sold. But just before the curtain rose, a disappointing announcement was made. The famous tenor had fallen ill; his role that afternoon would be sung by an almost unknown substitute. So the performance began and the substitute tenor made his entrance and sang his first aria. Usually that solo is follow by a tumult of applause; this time the audience sat silent. Then something dramatic happened. A small boy, seated in a box near the stage, rose and addressed the singer. In a high childish voice audible to everyone he exclaimed, ' Daddy you're wonderful.' Then, suddenly everyone was clapping furiously…clapping and wiping away tears"

As a father of four, I sometimes feel my inadequacy as the "head of the clan." When I feel inadequate, insecure, lacking in worth, inferior, I need to be reminded of God's great love for me. Today's feature study applies to everyone, but it is especially given as an encouragement to fathers.

Norman

When we feel inferior we feel inadequate. We feel unworthy and we tend to exaggerate those feelings beyond their true proportion. It spills over into our relationships. If we maintain a low opinion of ourselves, we have a tendency to treat others poorly. This can have a devastating effect on family relationships.

Our sense of well being is largely determined by how well we relate to other people, in social situations, in the work place, in recreational activities and in the family. My social graces left a lot to be desired. Nobody told me you're supposed to hold your left hand in your lap throughout the meal when you dine in polite society. I didn't even know that you're not supposed to use the knife by your plate to scoop butter from the butter bowl and apply it directly to your bread. In fact, my father ate everything with a spoon and so did I until I started to school and learned how to eat with a fork. West Texas does not really set the social standards for polite society, but I was a long way behind the prevailing standards of that area. Needless to say when you don't know the difference between Emily Post and a fence post, you may commit some social errors when you try to mix and mingle with people. And I can guarantee you that when you do, some people will tell you about it and they won't be tactful when they do it.

You take so much of that and you get the idea that you are a substandard human being. I still remember an insensitive remark made by a fellow college student. One day he said to me, "Bales, you don't have an inferiority complex. You're inferior." He was joking, I think, but that message stung my ego like a bumblebee. Over the years, I've come to understand that clever put downs are the tools of insecure people, who think they can make themselves look big, but making others look little. But I didn't know that back then. I used to hang around people like that, hoping that I could someday gain their kind of confidence. It took me a long time to understand the difference between conceit and a healthy sense of self worth.

As you might well suspect, I didn't have a very comfortable relationship with God. To me, God was hard to please. No, that's not right. He was impossible to please. I tried but no matter how hard I tried I still made mistakes and I knew that I disappointed God. I figured he loathed the sight of me. At that point in my life, grace didn't even enter the picture. I wanted to get to heaven, but I didn't figure that I would. I saw God as the enemy of the human race, not really wanting to let people into heaven. It took me years to internalize the truth of 2 Peter 3:9 "The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance."

I've given this little autobiographical vignette because I know that some variation of this story could be repeated in many Christian lives. Some stories would be even more extreme than my own.

I've met numerous people in my life who were good people by human standards, sincere people, sensitive people, but they never became Christians because they thought they weren't good enough. I've said all this just so that you will understand that the problem of inferiority is no small problem. It manifests itself in many ways. It not only poisons our self image, it damages our relationships with friends, family and with God.

Because our thinking tends to be distorted on this point, I want to quickly run through some Biblical teaching alone these lines. It is necessary to be selective because the Biblical data is far more extensive than space will allow us to relate. What I'm sharing here is but the tip of the iceberg and yet even this minute amount of Biblical teaching proves the worth of the human race beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt.

I need to put in a disclaimer here. In considering the Biblical data, it is necessary to make frequent use of the term, "man." Twenty years ago, nobody would have questioned that, but the feminist movement has caused some to think disparagingly of the word "man" as a generic term for the human race. I'm not attempting to be chauvinistic, but it's much less cumbersome just to use "man" to refer to mankind than it is to try to come up with gender neutral pronouns. So ladies, please don't take offense if I don't say God assigns worth to men and women everytime I present this concept. Man, in this lesson, does not mean male, but male and female. The same thing is true of such pronouns as "He", "His" and "Him." I'm not working from a gender neutral translation.

1. Old Testament Data.

People have value and worth by virtue of creation. In Genesis 1:26, God said, "Let us make man in our image and our likeness." How dare we put the label of inferiority on anything that God made in his image? In Genesis 2:7, we're told "The Lord God framed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living being." Notice that God used material which he had already created - the dust of the ground - to bring man into being. There was no evolutionary process here. The existence of man on the earth is not a biological accident. It was not the result of natural selection or the product of mathematical chance. We are here because God planned for us to be here, designed us in his own mind and placed us on this earth.

Paul commented on this truth much later in his sermon on Mars Hill when he said, "From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they would live." (Acts 17:26). If God went to that much trouble to benefit the human race, then we surely must rate pretty high on his list of valued things. But there's more. In the 8th Psalm, we have this important bit of data on the worth of man. "You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:5).

The Old Testament also suggest that people are different and distinct from all other parts of God's creation. According to Genesis 1:26, man has rule over the "fish of the sea and birds of the air, over livestock and over all creatures that move on the ground." Sometimes the more extreme elements of the animal rights movement have suggested that every living thing has as much right to live as man. But God was talking to man in Genesis 2:29-30, when he said, "I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And all the beasts of the earth, and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground that has the breath of life in it. I give every green plant for food and it was so." As a human being you are worth more than a microbe. You're more valuable than a stinging scorpion or a rat or even your family dog.

The Old Testament also supports the worth of man in that it recognizes the rational capacity for thought. When animal rights people talks about animals having rights, do they mean that an animal has the right to vote, to serve on a jury, to choose an occupation? Animals respond to instinct. Only man is capable of rational thought in any significant sense of the term. And don't tell me how smart dolphins are. They don't work complicated math problems and they don't design cars and they cannot respond to "Repent and be baptized for the remission of sins." In his thinking ability, man is in a category by himself. The ten commandments were given to people who were capable of understanding them and responding to them.

Finally the Old Testament confirms the worth and value of man when it talks about man being accountable for his behavior and when he is given the capacity to decide what he's going to do about God's commands. In Joshua 25:14, the leader of Israel said, "Choose for yourself this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefather served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, but as for me and my house we will serve the Lord."

2. The worth of man is confirmed in the teachings and example of Jesus.

In Matthew 10, Jesus talked about the sparrows. He said that it is impossible for a sparrow to fall to the ground apart from the will of the father. In verse 31, he said, "So do not be afraid: you are worth much more than the sparrows." You see how he valued people in the way he treated them. He touched and healed lepers, the most dreaded outcasts in the land. When his peers wrote off tax collectors as incorrigible people, Jesus invited one of them to become an apostle. When his disciples scolded people for bringing their children to him, he affirmed the worth of children. Of course there are many episodes in which Jesus demonstrated the value of the downtrodden, the untouchables and the nobodies of the world.

3. The worth of man is confirmed in the writings of Paul.

It's the writings of Paul that leads many people to the conclusion that man has little worth. Its true that Paul was concerned about the universality of sin. In Romans 1 he talks about the depravity of the Gentile world. In verse 28, he says, "Since they did not think it worthwhile to retain their knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind." In chapter 2 he indicts the Jew on the same ground. "You have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself because you who pass judgment do the same things. " Then in 3:9 he wraps up the whole ball of wax and says, "Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin."

But at the same time Paul confirms the worth of people as he reveals the story of salvation. In Romans 5:8, he says, But "God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." How can we ever regard ourselves as having inferior worth if God's idea about our worth is that we were so precious in His sight that He was willing to send his son to die for us?

But it goes beyond that in Paul. It's not just that God does a salvage job on a life that's been wrecked by sin, but God gives a person a whole new nature. If your car is totaled in an accident and you take it to a junk yard, the junk man will salvage some of the parts, but the car that was once your pride and joy will never travel the highways again. Imagine what it would be like if your car could be renewed to showroom condition. That's what God is willing to do for us. We are capable of taking on a new nature. In 2 Corinthians. 5:17, Paul said, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone. The new has come."

And the really neat thing about the new nature is that we are capable of being continually renewed even as the physical body deteriorates. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 4:16, "Therefore, we do not lose heart. Though outwardly, we are wasting away, yet inwardly, we are being renewed day by day.

I've known people who devoured books like Norman Vincent Peale's Power of Positive Thinking and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. Some of them indeed increased their performance and met their sales quotas. But often it was done at the expense of their family relationships, their relationship with God, and it did nothing to help them deal with the problem of their sinfulness. Their supervisors may applaud them as successful people, but their lives are dysfunctional lives away from work.

The problem I'm describing is spiritual in nature. You don't deal with spiritual problems simply by teaching people to program positive thoughts into their head, although that indeed is a part of what needs to be done. You deal with the spiritual problem of inferiority by reminding people that they are a special creation of God, that God has given them the freedom of choice, that God sent his son to die to help us out of the predicament we got ourselves into when we made the wrong choices and that he plants a new nature inside us.

As we approach this "Father's Day," I would like to remind ever father that the way you feel about yourself, your capabilities, your worth in the sight of God, you ability to bestow warmth and affection has much to do with the way you instill those same values in your children. That's especially true of Son. You really can't teach what you make no attempt to model. We also need to be reminded that the things we say to our children has a great deal to do with how they regard themselves and how they feel about their worth in God's sight.

NEXT WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLE: "A Special Look at Raising P. K's"