We place value on a lot of things in life. In fact, our entire world revolves around the value of things. That’s what our entire economy is based on. Our entire world revolves around value. It has to, in fact. We wouldn’t be able to function as a society if we didn’t know how much things are worth.
There’s one thing, however, that we don’t generally have a set value for. That’s the value we place on ourselves. If someone were to ask me how much I am worth, I obviously couldn’t give them a set dollar amount. There’s probably a way I do measure myself, though, only by more ambiguous means. See, I think we often times place our value on ourselves by what we can or can’t do. So, when we’re successful and on top of the world we are super valuable. Then, when we feel like failures and nothing is going right in our lives we tend to feel like our value is pretty low. This is a kind of performance-based value. Is this the correct way to value ourselves?
I think because we often place our value on material items in this life, in this way, that we have the tendency to do the same with ourselves and even other people. This isn’t a very stable ground to stand on, though. If I value myself that way, then who knows how much I’m going to be worth tomorrow, or even today. I will get some really subjective results.
Let’s be honest, though. A lot of this comes down to pride. I think we even partly want to be valued in this way. We want our own worth to be performance-based. That way we can feel like we had something to do with our value. We like that feeling when we finish first in a race. We feel really valuable then. When we finish last, not so much. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with taking pride in these things. It’s just a matter of basing our personal worth on these things. But I also think we like feeling like we’re somewhat in control of our value. If there’s anything we don’t like as human beings, it’s ambiguity. I mean, at least this way I can know exactly what I’m worth. When I win a race, I’m so valuable that I came in 1st place. When I lose a race, I’m so worthless that I came in last place. And, although we don’t like the last result, we find comfort in the terms being clearly defined.
This gets me on to my next point. That is this: I think our personal worth, in our minds, is often based on comparing ourselves with others. Take, for example the grades we got in school. Sometimes it wasn’t just about how good our grades were, it was about how good our grades were compared to everyone else’s. So, now it’s not just a competition with our expectations, it’s a competition with other people. This is ambiguous as well, though. I might be better than everyone else one day, and worse than everyone else the next day.
Let me just say that none of these methods of valuing ourselves are accurate. Seriously, that’s no way to live. I mean, who wants to live on that roller coaster.
…Let’s go deeper—What are you worth?
What if I told you that I can tell you exactly how much you’re worth? I know what you’re thinking, “You just told me that if someone were to ask you, you couldn’t put an exact dollar amount on yourself.” That’s true, I did say that. I can, however, put a value on ourselves. What if I told you that value never changes no matter what you do? It’s not based on your performance. Your value never goes up and never goes down. You could say that you hold your value. If you were a car, you could say you have good resale value. This is a good sign. Quality items always hold their value. So, do you want to know your exact worth? OK. Here it is; John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” There it is. That’s what you’re worth. God places so much value on you that you’re worth the shedding of His son, Jesus, on the cross.
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If you need even more proof, there’s this verse in Romans 5:8 “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” This shows that God wasn’t going to base his value of us on our performance. This says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” This is how he showed his love for us.
So, now we know that God’s love for us isn’t performance-based. Now what? Well, while He died for us regardless of what we’ve done, we still need to respond to His gift on the cross. We are all in a mess until we respond to Him. So, we need to receive this gift by confessing our sin, repenting, and then following Him. When we do that and allow Him to change us from within we become a new creation and we gain a new understanding of Him and ourselves. You could say, this is when we truly realize our worth.
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Matthew 18:12-13 says, “How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? And if so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that [sheep], than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.”
Romans 5:8 “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”