10 of those

Highly recommended – challenging and encouraging

T Nixon

This book is brilliant. Everyone should read it. It starts with an overview of how self–esteem has become so embedded in our culture. Whilst this part has quite a bit on the history of psychology, it isn’t too complicated for someone (like me) who has no previous training or reading in this area and really helps to make it relevant to where we have got to today. The latter part of the book is how we as Christians should be challenged to change our thinking about self–esteem (and how we should be doing this in our family lives, our schools and our churches) and encouraged to think about our Biblical identity. There were so many quotes that I loved from this book – it is now heavily underlined. Here are some of my favourites; “our mindless piggy–backing onto the self–esteem movement remains one of the most potent examples of our intellectual vulnerability to the latest ‘thing’ “ “We cannot signify ourselves. We need a comprehensive and philosophically coherent worldview, capable of addressing the big questions of significance in terms of who we are and how we came to be.” “In the world of self–esteem everybody deserves to feel good and is worthy of happiness. But the biblical doctrine of sin hardly leads to the conclusion that we are worthy of happiness…in terms of the gospel, in what sense can we be considered worthy?…does the Bible encourage us to pursue self–worth at all?” “It’s time to bring an end to evaluating or ‘rating’ yourself as a human being. God has done that for you. Because of his gift of grace, you are loved, blessed and called into his glory. And that’s that.” I shall be buying more to give away.