Who Am I? Does it Matter?

I was asked to speak at The River Tree Church recently on love. It was a great day and I was able to talk about God's love for His children.

We hear a lot about "Giving people dignity" on TV, radio and even in the most powerful court in America. It is shocking to me to see how deluded so many educated people can think about identity. It appears that the majority of the people in America are firmly convinced that we get our dignity from the government, the courts and public opinion.

The whole idea of "Hate Speech" is based on this false notion.  As Martin Seligman says, "The USA is experiencing a dramatic rise in depression, anxiety and entitlement attitudes because of the "Self Esteem Movement".

The Self Esteem movement has led schools to eliminate competitive sports, give medals to everyone and remove any sense of accomplishment from good behavior. Such ideas fly in the face of research and common sense. It is also a severe attack on the dignity of students, especially minorities.

Th Declaration of Independence got it right. All people are Created with Equal Dignity. God gives dignity! The imago Dei or image of God is conferred on each person at birth. For schools, courts and sports to think we can confer or remove basic dignity is saying "God is not enough so you do not have dignity until we give it to you!"

Hate Speech indicates that an evil person can reduce or remove my dignity by what he says?! What could be more ridiculous? By saying such a thing we agree that human dignity is so fragile that any deranged or evil person can take it away with a single word.

the old saying, "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me" has enormous psychological and theological truth in it. If I ALLOW an evil person's words to bother or destroy me it is the result of MY choice to accept their statement as a fact.

Some hateful, evil, deranged teenager recently killed nine wonderful, God fearing brothers and sisters at a church prayer meeting. The media have feverishly pointed out that it was a "Hate Crime". The murdered Christians have more dignity in death than a million evil boys in ISIS or Emmanuel Church will ever have in their murderous rampages.

Why does the media attack the dignity of these men and women by pointing out the murder's attempt to reduce it? The response of the families and church members shows exactly how much dignity they had and have. The drug dazed kid did not remove their dignity but magnified its reality.

God gives dignity and every time humans try to take His job, they minimize the real thing.

See my book, Healing Release of the Holy Spirit for who we are in God's eyes.