Valuable to God — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

How much are you worth? Those who know about the human body tell us your worth is about $10 and when you break down the chemicals, the oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, potassium, chlorine – all these other things – you’re valued at around about $10. Bit depressing, isn’t it? A good meal would cost more than that. So where do we get our value? James Dobson said, ‘People all over the world judge value in people by two things, and they are beauty and intelligence. And then, of course, there’s social status, success, talent and your ethnic background.’

So many people make these things the value that matter. But I find it interesting that the Christian faith says we know better than this. The Apostle Paul has some tremendous words in his letter to the Ephesians Christians in Ephesians 2:10 – “for we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us a new in Christ Jesus so we can do good things that he planned for us long ago.” And another version says God always.

does what He plans, and that’s why he had Christ choose us so it’s quite amazing that God did choose each of us to follow him, we’re different. Our journey has been, in some cases, a long one, with many twists and turns, and our feelings can deceive us sometimes. And we think, What use am I? I’m nobody special. We’ve got this mental image of how we look at ourselves, and that image determines everything we do.

Is it about beauty and intelligence? Josh McDowell tells how he went to speak at the university. He made some comments about self-image, and as he was leaving the auditorium, a student handed him a poem that had written. It said, God created you to be you and me to be me and if I’m not me, who else will be? In other words, if you are not you, there’s no one else in the world with the same unique gifts that God has given you.

I think there four unfortunate words we can say about ourselves, and they are, “I’m not good enough.” I’ll never be good enough. My best is not good enough. I worry about what others think of me, and I feel worthless now. Look their lives because God has made you for a reason. There’s an interesting book called Wild Goose Chase by Mark Patterson, he says, “We become so fixated on past mistakes that we forfeit future opportunities, we mistakenly think were disqualified from ever being useful to God.”

The Bible records a story about Moses, who thought he was a nobody. Moses, a hero of the faith, was called by God for a very important job to lead the people of God out of slavery. But he hesitated. I’m no good, he said to God, no good with words. I’m not a good speaker. Will you find somebody else? But God persisted and Moses followed through. He needed actually to change his own personal view.

Some wonderful words in Psalm 139 – You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body
    and knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.
¹⁵ You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion,
    as I was woven together in the dark of the womb.
¹⁶ You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

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So worth is based on what God says about us. The scriptures say how great is the love that the father has lavished on us? That we should be called the Children of God. And that’s what we are. And this means we are valuable to God because he loves us. We need him. He loves us the way we are.

Let’s Pray

Gracious God, thank you for loving us as we are. Thank you that you define us. Stop these negative thoughts that come into our lives that are so unworthy. Rewind the tapes of our past and erase the mistakes of the past, because Lord, we can waste so much time and energy beating ourselves up. And when you say to us you don’t belong to yourself. I bought you with a high price. You are mine. So, Lord, as your people, we know that when we commit ourselves to you, we become new people. Renewed. Amen.

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