Sunday, February 7, 2016

How Do We Get Significance? We Don't. It's Already Been Given to Us

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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