If you feel loved by your spouse, you can relax, knowing that he or she will do you no ill. You feel secure in your spouse’s presence. You may face many uncertainties in your vocation. You may have enemies in other areas of your life. But with your loved one, you feel secure.

Your sense of self-worth is fed by the fact that your spouse loves you. After all, if he or she loves you, you must be worth loving. Your parents may have given you negative or mixed messages about your worth, but your spouse knows you as an adult and loves you. That love builds your self-esteem.

Love is not the answer to everything, but it creates a climate of security in which we can seek answers to the things that bother us. In the security of love, a couple can discuss differences without condemnation. Conflicts can be resolved. Two people who are different can learn to live together in harmony. We discover how to bring out the best in each other.

Take time to pray and:

Thank God for giving you someone who helps you recognize your self-worth;

Ask Him to help you do the same for your spouse;

Ask Him to bless your relationship so that it will bear fruit for Him.

Take time to discuss and reflect:

On what do you base your self-worth?

On what does your spouse base his or her self-worth?

How can you help each other guard against situations and people that can damage your self-worth?

Consider these passages for further study on self-worth:

Psalm 139:13-15 For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

Colossians 3:12-14 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. ¹³ Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. ¹⁴ And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Titus 3:5 he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit,

When I think of my self-worth, I do my best not to rely on anyone else to determine what my self-worth is. Everyone else has their own opinion, and I wanted to base it on my own decisions and not others. I love hearing the ideas of other people, yet that should not determine who I am. How independent are you in determining what your self-worth is?

So God created human beings in his own image” (Genesis 1:26-27). This conversation places people above the animals and gives them the capacity to have a relationship with God.

This theme of human worth carries throughout Scripture. God made people “only a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor” (Hebrews 2:7). Even God’s rules illustrate how God the Father “loves you and keeps you safe in the care of Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:1). All the specific commands in both the Old and New Testaments affirm our worth, flow from His love, and direct us toward a higher goal. While some people find the commands of God restrictive and rebel against them, those who know God believe that His prohibitions are designed to keep them safe (see Jude 1:21) and to help them experience life’s highest good. The words of Jude 1:24 ring with His love for us: “Now all glory to God, who is able to keep you from falling away and will bring you with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault.”

Take time to pray to:

Thank Him for how He “loves you and keeps you safe in the care of Jesus Christ” (Jude 1:1);

Ask Him to help you grasp “how wide, how long, how deep his love is” (Ephesians 3:18).

Take time to discuss and reflect:

To what extent do you experience God’s rule as restrictive, and to what extent do you experience God’s rules as freeing?

How does Jude 1:24 affirm your individual value in God’s eyes?

As you more fully grasp God’s love for each individual, how does that change your own sense of self-worth? How does it change how you perceive others?

Consider these passages for further study on Self-worth:

Psalm 139:1-18;

You have searched me, Lord,
    and you know me.
² You know when I sit and when I rise;
    you perceive my thoughts from afar.
³ You discern my going out and my lying down;
    you are familiar with all my ways.
⁴ Before a word is on my tongue
    you, Lord, know it completely.
⁵ You hem me in behind and before,
    and you lay your hand upon me.
⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
    too lofty for me to attain.

⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit?
    Where can I flee from your presence?
⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
    if I settle on the far side of the sea,
¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me,
    your right hand will hold me fast.
¹¹ If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
    and the light become night around me,”
¹² even the darkness will not be dark to you;
    the night will shine like the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.

¹³ For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
¹⁷ How precious to me are your thoughts,^[a] God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸ Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.

Micah 7:18; Who is a God like you,
    who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
    of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
    but delight to show mercy.

Matthew 10:29-31 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.^[a] 30 And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. ³¹ So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Jude 1:1-25

Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James,

To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for^[a] Jesus Christ:

² Mercy, peace, and love be yours in abundance.

The Sin and Doom of Ungodly People

³ Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. ⁴ For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about^[b] long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.

⁵ Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord^[c] at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe. ⁶ And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on a great Day. ⁷ In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire.

⁸ In the very same way, on the strength of their dreams these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority, and heap abuse on celestial beings. ⁹ But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!”^[d] 10 Yet these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct—as irrational animals do—will destroy them.

¹¹ Woe to them! They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error; they have been destroyed in Korah’s rebellion.

¹² These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead. ¹³ They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever.

¹⁴ Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones ¹⁵ to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”^[e] 16 These people are grumblers and faultfinders; they follow their own evil desires; they boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage.

A Call to Persevere

¹⁷ But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. ¹⁸ They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.” ¹⁹ These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit.

²⁰ But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, ²¹ keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

²² Be merciful to those who doubt; ²³ save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy, mixed with fear—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh.^[f]

Doxology

²⁴ To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— ²⁵ to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power, and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen

It makes you think of how you carry your perspective with God’s perspective of us. Thoughts of Gary Chapman.