Earlier this week, the global human rights leader and freedom fighter Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr. died peacefully at his home in Chicago, Illinois. Since his death, the world has paused to pay tribute to his remarkable legacy. In his polished and precise way, former President Barak Obama fittingly said that “from organizing boycotts and sit-ins, to registering millions of voters, to advocating for freedom and democracy around the world, (Jackson) was relentless in his belief that we are all children of God, deserving of dignity and respect,” and that (Jackson) “laid the foundation for my own campaign to the highest office of the land,” and that all of us “stood on his shoulders.”

But before we stood on his shoulders, Jackson stood on the balcony outside of room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1967 next to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph Abernathy minutes before King was assassinated. And before he stood on that balcony, Jackson had stood beside Dr. King for more than 3 years, serving as one of his chief lieutenants after leaving Chicago Theological Seminary to give his life to the civil rights movement. But Reverend Jackson would have never stood next to Dr. King, nor would have President Obama nor any of us been able to stand on his shoulders, if Reverend Jackson had not stood up for himself.

When he was just 23 years old, Jackson moved to Chicago. He had long been interested in politics, and was able to secure a recommendation letter from the then Governor of North Carolina James Sandford that he hoped to use to land a job with the then Mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley. When Daley received the letter, he met with Reverend Jackson and offered him a job as a toll-collector.

Now, there is nothing wrong with being a toll-collector. But Reverend Jackson didn’t see himself as a toll collector. Reverend Jackson didn’t even see himself as a mayor. Reverend Jackson saw himself as a President! Several years later when Jackson ran for president, several of his high school classmates said that when he signed their yearbooks, he predicted that one day he would be president of the United States. So when Daley offered Reverend Jackson that job, he politely declined the offer, stood up, and walked out. He walked out because the vision that Mayor Daley had for him was not the vision that he had for himself. He walked out of that office and into history.

How you see yourself is one of the most important predictors of success. Proverbs 23:7 says that as a “man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” You have to think like a success before you become a success. You have to think like a millionaire before you become a millionaire. You have to think like a surgeon before you become a surgeon. You cannot outsource your self-concept. If you allow someone else to define you, they will.

This is what happened to the children of Israel. Prior to entering the Promised Land, God instructed Joshua to send a group of spies to conduct reconnaissance. The objective of their mission was to ascertain the opposition they would have to fight, as well as to collect samples of the land’s produce. After 40 days of research, only two of the men who went on the mission thought that the children of Israel could successfully occupy the land. The others offered a more dismal prognosis:

But the other men who had explored the land with him disagreed. “We can’t go up against them! They are stronger than we are!” So they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites: “The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there. All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak. Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!” (Numbers 13:31-33)

There is no record that these men ever had a conversation with any of the giants that they saw. But they assumed that the giants classified them as grasshoppers. We do not know how the giants saw the Israelties. But we do know how the Israelites saw themselves. They had an acute case of grasshopper-itis. They saw themselves as small, insignificant, and unworthy.

So here is today’s question: how do you see yourself?

I am so glad that Reverend Jackson saw himself as more than a toll collector. Think of how many lives would have never been changed, how many barriers would have never been broken, how many laws would have never been passed, and how much history would have never been made if he had accepted that job. Although he never became President, his desire for that office is noble and noteworthy. His apparent failure was a spellbinding success.

Grasshopper-itis