The Messages We Receive

A recent interaction with my son led me to reflect on the messages people receive about who they are. My son asked me why there are so many pictures of him and his sister around our house, and I gave him a simple and true answer: “Because I like seeing you.” I’m thankful he asked because it gave me a chance to make a true message overt. Since then, I’ve tried to embellish the message by periodically adding more words to it. 

These are the kinds of messages that I hope will shape how he sees himself. It’s important to me that he knows he is loved and cherished. It’s important because it is true and because it is a message that God speaks to his children, one that parents are then meant to reflect to them. 

Messages about who we are—our identity—are powerful. They can shape how we see ourselves, how we see the world, and how we see God. It is a matter that regularly comes up in counseling conversations. When people have hard experiences in their lives or have been mistreated by others, it always proves valuable to explore what messages those experiences have communicated about who they are. 

So we explore: What message came with the hard experiences or mistreatment in your life?

• A woman’s husband left her after an affair. The message she received from his sin against her was this: “You are disposable, and you are replaceable.”
• An adult daughter was processing her mother’s alcohol abuse that extended throughout her childhood. The message she received from her mother’s behavior was this: “My drinking is what I love most. You are not important to me.” 
• A man had been bullied in high school for his weight. The message he received from the bullies was this: “You are a disgusting spectacle.”

It’s always startling to hear people put words to the messages they’ve received from other people’s treatment or choices because they are typically so harsh. It is heartbreaking to realize how much freight these messages carry, and to come to understand just how much impact they have had on how a person sees themselves. One of the privileges of being a Christian counselor is we often get the chance to help dispel false messages, and share how God sees his children and what he says about them. And that is always good news. 

Even so, hearing an accurate message one time about how God sees you won’t quickly jettison a cruel, false message. Dismantling false messages takes time, and it takes work. It requires listening, and it requires faith. It involves prayer, and it involves community.

Perhaps as you read this blog, you are recalling instances in your life when someone mistreated you or did shameful things to you. Perhaps you are now considering for yourself, “What message did I receive?” If you have identified one of those messages, I’d like you to notice that the message probably says something about you, not about the other person. You can see this in the examples above; it is one of the insidious aspects of shame. Someone’s mistreatment leads to a shameful message that speaks about who we are. But that is not how the Bible teaches us to understand being mistreated. What flows out of someone—including their choices, behaviors, and words—comes from their heart (Prov 4:23). Therefore, their mistreatment of you says more about their heart and says much less—if anything—about you. This is important to let sink in. It helps you reject shame. It helps you separate the truth from the lie.

For the situations above, it leads to insights like these.

• The wife can say, “My husband’s sin was wrong and grievous, but it does not mean I am a disposable person. I am not replaceable.”
• The daughter can say, “My mother had a life-dominating addiction that greatly hindered her availability to be there for me. But that does not mean that I was not important to her.”
• The man can say, “I struggled with my weight, and that was an occasion for immature kids to be cruel. But I was not, and I am not, disgusting. I wasn’t a spectacle who deserved ridicule.”

From there, we embellish the true message even more. We listen to what God says about who we are. We hear his words. We learn to receive them by faith. We rehearse them over and over. We participate in a community that speaks his good words to one another. 

What does he say? Listen. His Word tells us so much about who we are. I’ll just take the first few verses from Ephesians as an example. From the way Paul writes to Christians and what he says about them, we learn many truths about who we are.  

These are the true messages about your identity. These are messages that speak to the value and the regard that God has for you. These are the messages that should dominate our understanding of ourselves—no matter what we have done or left undone, no matter what was done to us or said about us by others. They’re true because of what God did for you in Christ (2 Tim 1:9). They’re true because he is the King of the universe, and so whatever he says is true is true indeed, and will be so for all time (Ps 47:2). His words will not pass away (Matt 24:34). Therefore, you can build your life on his words, and you can build your identity on them. 

As a next step, go look for more of your Father’s embellishments. Look at 1 Peter 2:9–10. Check out Jesus’s words in John 15:15. Jump next to 1 Corinthians 3:16. In these places and throughout Scripture, our Father in heaven embellishes freely. He is brimming with good words about his children. Metaphorically speaking (and maybe even literally!), his house is filled with pictures of his children. It is filled with pictures of you.