“Now God has us where He wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all His idea, and all His work. All we do is trust Him enough to let Him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving.” (Ephesians 2:7-9 MSG)
The greatest need of any person is to be known and loved. The cry is strong; the human desire is deep. "I want to be somebody. I want my life to count." Closely related to the feeling of worth is the perception of who we are. When we esteem something or someone, we highly value it or the person. To esteem ourselves is to have high regard for ourselves. Many of the problems in human relations stem from a person's lack of self-esteem.
[However,]... our worth and value is given. We are called not to muster it up within ourselves, but to receive the gift given to us, a gift of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. God has declared our value. Our value is not rooted in self-esteem, based only on ourselves. Our value is discovered in grace, which is rooted in the greatness and graciousness of God...
God's love makes it possible to know we are valued. We cannot put ourselves down or debase ourselves. We can know our true worth because we are children of God. Our esteem is rooted in the amazing grace of God. Our esteem is grace-esteem.
-- H. Eddie Fox in “Grace-Esteem”
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