At my old church in Long Island, folks had a
terrible Christmas Eve this year, and it was because of me. It began
with my parents’ Christmas letter.
Every year my mom and dad send out a letter updating all their friends,
well really anybody whose address they have, on the goings on of the kids and
grandkids. This Christmas they mentioned
how my brother-in-law, Kenny, is fighting stage 4 cancer (he’s doing quite well
by the way). So someone in my old
church got the letter, but he didn’t read Kenny there. He read Kennedy. And so
that Christmas Eve night, he went around sharing the news of how Kennedy had
stage 4 cancer. People were
devastated. They were heartbroken.
Now when someone finally told me all this a few
weeks ago, I’d like to tell you how sad I was that this false bulletin had
ruined Christmas Eve for so many. But
I can’t. Honestly the mess made me feel
good, even flattered. I thought. Sheesh, it’s been ten years since I left and
they still care. It was like getting a
glimpse of my own funeral, and it was kinda nice.
But pretty much every human being yearns for
something similar. Everyone wants to
know that their lives matter, that they have worth and value, someone who will
not be forgotten. And we, more than we
even realize, focus our lives on finding that significance. We get haunted by the fear that in the end, we
will be pretty much forgotten, that much of our significance will die with us.
But our yearning for significance, for self-worth, isn’t
something we get over. It’s built in to
us. It’s part of who we are. The problem is that we try to get signficance.
But you can’t get it. It can only be
given to you. And in these words from
Romans, God shows us the way that gift comes. Let’s listen and hear what God has to say.
Human beings yearn for significance, to feel that
their lives have value and worth. Now
we may not sense that we’re yearning for that.
But deep underneath the yearning drives us. But you can’t get significance. Significance can only be given to you. In
these words here, Paul is showing us how that happens.
That’s what Paul is telling us when he says the
righteousness of God has been disclosed, a righteousness through faith in Jesus. Now when we hear that word, righteousness,
we can think of good deeds, or simply an absence of bad ones. But righteousness means more than that. It means a right relationship with others,
with ourselves, and with God. That’s
what has now been revealed.
Last week, we talked about why our relationships
aren’t right. It’s because everything
we do, even our good deeds, always centers on ourselves. On our own, we cannot but be self-focused,
even self-obsessed. In everything we
do, even our best deeds, we’re always looking for a pay-off. And what is that pay-off? We’re searching for significance; for worth;
for value.
Now when people seek this worth from God, they do it
by trying to generate a good moral record. If I do the right things, am kind to others,
obey the golden rule etc. then God values me. God sees me as worthy and
significant. But those who go this way
always wonder. How good is good enough? How much is enough? Am I really as worthy as I think I am.
But Paul says, this significance, this worthiness
has come to you, and have no doubt, it’s good enough. In fact, this worthiness, this right
relationship is nothing short of perfect.
And it frees you from your yearning for significance. Why.
Now you have it, this value, this worth, utterly and completely.
Now before we dig deeper into what this worthiness
is, let’s be clear. You don’t have to
even believe in God to be seeking this significance or worthiness. Everyone seeks it. It’s why as the writer David Foster Wallace put
it, everyone worships.
As he said to the graduates of Kenyon College:
In
the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as
atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The
only choice we get is what to worship.
And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or
spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship
will eat you alive.
If
you worship money and things if they are where you tap real meaning in life,
then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough…worship your body
and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will
die a million deaths before they finally plant you…Worship power, you will up
feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb
you to your own fear. Worship your
intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always
on the verge of being found out. But the
insidious thing about these forms of worship is…. they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
What is Wallace talking about when he talks about
worship? He is saying that every one of
us has some way in which we’re looking to find significance and worth in our
world. Every one of us is looking for
something that justifies our existence; that says that we matter, that we are worthy. But wherever we look not only does it not
bring the worth we seek, it actually undermines what worth we do feel.
A week or so ago, I was listening to the radio as a
psychologist talked about how he saw far too many parents trying to be their
kids’ best friend. They dreaded being
thought of as un-cool by their kids, and as a result they had huge difficulty
setting appropriate boundaries. For
example, instead of saying to their kids before they went to bed, “Your cell
phone stays locked up until the morning.
You need your sleep more than texting your friends at 2 am in the
morning.” They’d simply let them have
it. And then they wondered why their
kids were distracted and inattentive at school, not realizing that they were
simply sleep deprived. But the parents
he saw were reluctant to enforce such boundaries, because they feared how it
might affect their relationship with their kids. Their kids had become a source of their
self-worth, of their value. If my kids
like me, then I must be pretty good. But
their passion for their child’s happiness was utterly selfish, to make them
feel good, and their selfish passion was destroying their kids. And some day, when their children mess up, as
all children do, it might destroy them.
Now you might say, well those parents just need a
therapist. It’s a psychological problem. No it isn’t.
It’s a psychological manifestation of something we all have, the yearning for worth, for significance for value.
Think about it. Everyone cares
about what others think, how others view them or value them. More
than that, even if others think that we’re awesome, amazing, incredible, we
know. That ain’t us. We may be good, but all of us know however
good we are, we could be better. We all
sense that in some ways we’re not measuring up.
So we look to our looks or our wealth or our success or our families or even
our religion to shore ourselves up. But
that doesn’t work either.
So what does?
It’s what Paul is telling us here.
In Jesus, God justifies you. God
validates you. God makes us worthy. God justifies your existence and it costs you
nothing. God gives it as a free gift, at
least free to you.
Too often, Christians think that grace and justification,
that salvation is simply about forgiveness.
But God gives us far more than that.
In Christ Jesus, God places a worth, a value upon you that makes any
other value you might yearn for pale in comparison. That’s the gift that God gives, that you and
I are infinitely worthy and valued, more significant than you could possibly
imagine. And you don’t get it. You don’t earn it. God gives it to you
But of course, someone, even God telling you that
you are worthy and significant hardly makes it so. But in Jesus, God didn’t just tell you your
worth. Jesus Christ showed you your
worth. This gift of worth and value may come
freely to us, but it came at infinite cost to God. It cost God everything, even God’s very life.
We become so lost, so captured by our fruitless
search for significance and value that nothing less than the death of God could
bring us back. But in Jesus, God brought us back. Jesus lost his home so that we might come home. Jesus became utterly worthless and
insignificant to restore the worth and value we had lost. How do
you know that you have significance, that you have worth and value? In Jesus, God gave up everything for
you. That’s how much you are worth.
Leave
all your fruitless seeking for worth behind, all your false justifications. In
Jesus, you have perfect justification. In Jesus you are made completely
worthy. In Jesus, God gives you a significance that not
even death can take away.
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