Everything is worth something, you go into a shop and quite often the price tags are visible, (well that is apart from expensive shops where the price tags aren’t visible). When looking at the coat it isn’t first clear why it costs so much, but when you add the quality of material, cotton, the way it was made and the worker who made it, it soon becomes evident. Although I’m sure we’ve all looked at a piece of clothing and although we added all these variables in, we couldn’t figure out how something costs so much.
We can approach people this way, we add the type of person they are (personality, acts of good, the profession, because if you are a criminal you won’t get as much value as if you are a doctor), with the friends they keep, how they treat their family, how tolerant they are and whether they have enemies, we add this altogether and then we see what value they have. Culture has us believing that we work to get the value we have. And if you can’t work for your value, then that’s bad for you.
However this kind of logic doesn’t hold up, what about the people who can’t add to their own value like a small baby, or those with severe depression, because they can’t get out of bed or do anything that would increase this value, do we ultimately put them as less valuable than another who can?
Well, the answer to this question would be yes, a small baby will be able to earn their value when they grow up and severely depressed people just need to get a grip right?
But what if I told you it wasn’t that easy, because trust me that I know. Well that still doesn’t matter right, because regardless to what my opinion, it doesn’t stop this from being true does it?
What if I told you value is something we don’t have to work for. What if I told you before the creation of the world we all were given value, just because we are humans. Just because you are made in the image of God, before we did anything good or bad.
Well this either seems like a fairy story to help me sleep at night or it seems very unfair. Because if I’m saying we have value before we did anything good or bad, that means a murder has value. It means people who have done horrible things still holds value just because they are human.
Don’t misunderstand me here, God is a just God and his judgement will fall on all of us and although we do receive freedom if we trust in Christ, we still need to repent and move away from sin.
But although this is bad news for the righteous among us, the ones who have never lied, hated another in our hearts, gossiped, been prideful, hurtful to others, been jealous or turned away from God, I haven’t met anyone (including myself) who hasn’t done at least one of these things, apart from Jesus who died for all sin we commit, .
It’s great news for the rest of us. Because if our value comes in whose we are not what we do, we can finally rest in him knowing that our worth can’t be earned and we don’t have to strive anymore.
Again this doesn’t mean we don’t do anything with our lives, it means we live our lives for the one who gives us our value and worth, because even if we lose our value in the worlds eyes for doing this, we will never lose our value in the eyes of the one to whom everything heavenly and earthly will one day bow down.
Before I Understood 