Comparison

 “Admire someone else’s beauty without questioning your own.”

How often do we compare ourselves to other people, to their accomplishments and their appearance? 

Comparison will kill every relationship you have, if you let it. It tears apart people every single day. We think that by comparing, we can become a better version of ourselves, but really we are becoming a lesser version of someone else. With that, we also become a lesser version of ourselves.

We can spend our whole lives trying to be like someone, but we never will be because we were not made to be. 

I was listening to this sermon and it was focusing on the creation story. How God created the ocean and said that it was good, He created the sun and said that it was good, and He created mankind and said that it was good. Nothing was made lesser than, all was made good. When the God of the universe says that it is good, we can believe it. 

For me, the most convicting part of the sermon was when she was talking about comparison between creation. We don’t look at the sun or the ocean and compare ourselves. We don’t compare ourselves with creation, but we do with mankind.

There’s a quote that I love and it says, “At some part along the way, I thought that the original artist wasn’t good enough. When I compared his work to the standard of beauty which the world is showing me, I thought that the original artist wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t cool enough, it wasn’t what I wanted. So I traded the original design for something that was a copy.”

How often in life do we try to be a mere copy of someone? We go and get the same haircut, we date the same person, we get the same job, we try and do everything that we can to be just like them, but the only version that we could become, would be a lesser version because we can’t be exactly like them. We spend our whole lives trying to be someone else, that we lose who the original artist created us to be. When God created the world, He said the same thing about everything, He said that it was all good. He didn’t look at you and say that you were okay, He looked at you and said that you are good. We can look at someone and tell them that they are perfect, that they are good, that they are how God created them to be, but we don’t look at ourselves and say that. We look at ourselves and we compare. 

When we constantly compare ourselves with someone, we can get caught up in who gets the most likes, and who has the most followers. Ultimately, we are comparing who gets the most glory. We take away the glory from God and focus it on ourselves. Which one of us can get the most likes and followers, cause they’ll get the most praise? Instead of saying, how can we give God the most praise? 

What we don’t realize about comparison, is that we are comparing and compromising God, who never changes. Why would we want to change something that God sees as perfect? What would our lives look like if we believed that God created all things good? What would our lives look like if we looked at ourselves and said that we are good? What would life look like? Instead of comparison, we would have confidence. When we have confidence in our creator, we can finally have confidence in His creation!