Self Esteem?

Doesn't the teaching on self-esteem and its emphasis on self seem to make the problem worse? That certainly was my experience. When I tried to raise my own self-esteem, it just led to painful self-consciousness and further individualism. Even from a secular perspective, the self-esteem teaching seems suspect.

A bit further on in talking about schools and their desire to help kids with poor self-esteem, he writes:

The self-respect the schools are seeking to bestow comes only as a person develops a growing ability to meet difficult tasks, risk failure, and overcome obstacles. You can't simply confer self-esteem upon another person. To assume that other people can control our view of ourselves is what creates low self-esteem in the first place!

But even with all the crazy ways that popular books try to inflate our self-esteem, there is a biblical message in it all. The massive interest in self-esteem and self-worth exists because it is trying to help us with a real problem. The problem is that we really are not okay. There is no reason why we should feel great about ourselves. We truly are deficient. The meager props of the self-esteem teaching will eventually collapse and people will realize that their problem is much deeper. The problem is, in part, our nakedness before God.

- Ed Welch, When People Are Big And God Is Small, p. 28,29