According to psychologists, self-esteem is a person's general appraisal of his or her worth. This definition needs to be expanded to state that it's  a person's assessment of his or her own worth in relation to the worth of other human beings. A person with healthy self-esteem recognizes his or her position and importance in the world and knows that every other human is as valuable as he or she is. Healthy self-esteem allows you to accept yourself in spite of your limitations and flaws, and it allows you to accept every other individual. This does not mean that in order for your self-esteem to be considered healthy everybody needs to love you. It simply means that negative attitudes of prejudice, bigotry, and superiority have no place in the mind of a person that has healthy feelings of self value.

This might come as a shock to many because we have been led to believe that thinking that we are better than others means we have healthy feelings of self worth, or as some specialists say, our self esteem is too high.  But if you analyze carefully the definition, you will realize that there is no such thing as a too high self-esteem. It's either healthy or low. Hence, low self-esteem manifests itself in two extremes that I like to summarize as: worm-of-the-earth mentality on one extreme and on the other extreme a superiority complex. Both attitudes are indicative of low self-esteem.

Simply put, both the person who drags himself through life without recognizing his worth and the person who discriminates against others because he feels superior to them suffers from low self esteem.

How can this be? You might be asking. The short explanation is that the way you treat people is simply a reflection of how you feel about yourself. If you have not identified your worth as an individual you more than likely harbor feelings of contempt against yourself and against those who neglected to help you to develop a healthy sense of value. This contempt manifests itself in the way you pin point a certain type of persons, or ethnic group, or race, or nationality, and then try to convince yourself of how inferior they are. In so doing you falsely believe that you add importance to yourself. Making others seem small and insignificant might lead you to feel you are better than they are, but in reality you are only fooling yourself.

Let me use a clear example: you might have convinced yourself that because you have a certain skin color, type of hair, social status, education, etc. you are indeed better than those without those traits. Your home training, Society, and the media might have played a significant role in leading you to this conclusion. But when you identify your worth and learn to acknowledge the worth of other human beings you will realize that there is absolutely nothing that could ever make one human superior to another because our value can never come from the things we possess. A clear indication of this is that at the time of death the only thing we can take with us is our physical body. The dead all end up the same way: a heap of putrid meat.   Having had a certain skin tone, degree, or bank account has absolutely no effect on the rotting pattern of a corpse. So if in death we all obtain the same results, in life we are worth the same.

Scientists have spent a great deal of human and financial resources calculating the composition of (before the decomposition of), and the worth of the human body. When they totaled the monetary value of the elements in our bodies and the value of the average person's skin, they arrived at a net worth of $4.50! Human skin by itself, regardless of the color, is worth as much as cowhide-- $0.25 per square foot!

The good news is that in Christ we are worth infinitely more than $4.50. He shed his precious blood to add value to all who believe. That's worth thinking about.