So now the angels in the heavens are impressed with you,
and you're not impressed with yourself.
You think you're worthless.
Allah says in the Qur'an: وَلَقَدْ كَرَّمْنَا بَنِي آدَمَ [17:70]
We honoured the children of Adam عَلَيْهِ ٱلسَّلَام.
You know what this ayah teaches me?
It teaches me that I don't have to look for validation from anybody else.
I can look for "Did I do a good job or not? I should check.
Did the food come out?"
You shouldn't take this lesson and say "You know what? I don't need anyone else's opinion.
Now, I'm gonna go home, and pour all the salt into the food,
and then cook it, and say how does it taste?
Well I don't care about your opinion because Allah has honoured me."
That's not what I'm saying.
That's not what I'm saying at all. We do need to get correction from each other.
And by the way when you value yourself,
then being criticized is not humiliation.
When you truly honour yourself. When you truly realise your worthiness,
then you realise if someone is criticizing you
and saying "Hey you said this incorrectly.
Or you need to improve this. Or this could be better."
Then they're doing me a favour to help me improve.
I don't feel like I'm being insulted, because when you have really low self worth,
then criticism feels like you are being pushed even lower down.
But that feeling goes away once you have value for yourself.
Once you recognize Allah has given me value.
Then you start seeing correction or criticism as an opportunity.
As an opportunity to grow. It's not humiliating anymore.
But this is one side of the equation. That we value ourselves.
But Iblees, you know, he's got multiple tactics.
And I talked about balance in the beginning.
One of the things Allah gave us is balance.
Nowadays the majority of the world is no longer interested in educating itself through books,
or reading, or long study.
In fact if a video is more than 30 seconds, move on. Move on.
And then you know what they call that?
"I've been doing a lot of research." No you haven't.
You've been swiping Tiktok. That's not called research.
"But I've been doing a lot of research into psychology."
No, no you haven't.
A three minute YouTube video was not research into psychology.
You haven't studied anything. But we've become accustomed to quick soundbites.
You know, quick kinds of education.
And as a result of that we want quick validation.
And one of the things that's happened in a lot of this social media environment,
is one subject that keeps coming up is self love, self worth, self esteem,
which is what I'm talking about too.
But you can take that too far.
You're amazing. You're the best. Believe in yourself. You, you, you.
نفسك نفسك نفسك and you're like, yes. نفسي, نفسي, نفسي.
And you become obsessed with
"I'm awesome. I'm amazing."
And then some parents do this to their kids.
"You're the best. You're the best ever. You're the princess."
Little four-year-old girl, "You're my princess.
Everybody else is ugly. You're the prettiest. You're the best."
And this little girl turns into a monster.
She goes at school and she goes "The princess is here. Kiss the ring."
She develops this inflated sense of self.
Our worthiness before Allah is something that should make us humble.
Allah gave me such a high position. I'd better put put that to work.
And I want to give you this by analogy.
Imagine you didn't believe in yourself. You don't think you are that good,
but you applied for a job anyway.
You applied and you're like, "I am pretty sure they are not going to hire me."
You get a call back and they want to give you the executive position.
Way higher. And from what you know of yourself, you're like
"I am so not qualified for this."
But you get put in that position anyway.
Now once you get put in that position,
I want you to think about and I want myself to think about
"What's going on in my head inside?"
Am I thinking, "Yep. The boss is here. Watch out. That's my chair."
Or are you thinking "I have been given such a high position.
I better live up to this. I'd better up my game.
I better learn more. I better become more adaptive.
I better honor this role that I've been given, so I can actually prove my worthiness.
So the the honor was given to you first,
even before you got a chance to prove yourself.
The healthy attitude would be "I need to live up to this."
Like it or not, now I'm here, I better step up." You understand?
On the flip side is someone who gets that position
without having earned it and then says, "You know what?
What's what else is there to do? I already got this position.
Now I can look down at everybody else who doesn't have this position."
Fake it till you make it, right?
That's not how this works. This is actually the reality of arrogance.
So on the one hand we value ourselves.
But what we actually are supposed to value
is the potential that Allah gave us.
We're supposed to value the ability to make the effort, that Allah gave us.
Not the things that Allah gave us.
The things that Allah gave us He can give to anybody else.
And these things will come and they will go.
But the only thing of value before Allah and before ourselves, should actually be just our efforts.
وَأَنْ لَيْسَ لِلْإِنْسَانِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ [53:39]
Human beings will have nothing of worth on judgement day except the efforts that they made.
That's it. That's all that's going to matter.
So what's this balance between confidence and humility, that has to be struck?
Because too much self worth will turn into arrogance.
And too much humility, then you start thinking "I'm nothing, I'm nobody."
I'll give you an example of this that I saw in the Islamic space.