Not Worth Anything?

Not Worth Anything?

8/22/18

Every human being has asked themselves at some point in their lives this question or has believed that their worth does not matter to anyone.  It is this madness that our enemy acquires renting space in our hearts and minds that causes so much discontent that our reactions to such lies can reach to the eternal status.  It was never God’s plan for you or me to experience such disbelief in our existence and it is still today not God’s plan for you or me to live in such poverty.  When we doubt our own abilities and existence, the purpose that God has for our lives to the world is halted thus rendering us useless for others, the perfect setup for our enemy.  God wants us to understand that He has not lost faith in us nor has He placed any less value on our lives; however, He does want us to stop the path that we have chosen and return to Him so that He bless our lives for eternity before it is too late.  We are all more precious than we can even comprehend and it is our responsibility to share this truth with others.

After my discharge from the United States Air Force in 1992, I was at pretty much rock bottom in my life.  The long military career that I had been hoping for had been dashed through my own accord and almost everything that I had learned from the military was now but a memory.  I knew that my life was at a crossroads and I had two options to decide from and while it took me a while to actually believe in myself again, it did arrive at some point down the road, but that road was a bumpy one to travel.  I also could have given up on the career path that I had chosen long before my military service but instead, I clung on to it and held it tighter than ever.  God was not the most favorite person in my life either - at least in my eyes - for I had violated one of the most sacred acts of human existence as my military career ended, a divorce.  Growing up as a minister’s son I had always heard about the consequences of divorce and how bad things were when one occurred.  Also, I had been taught that when you marry it was for life and that it should be considered a holy institution for it was and continues to be the closest thing to the image of Covenant that humans have to compare with God’s Covenant.

This was the point in my life to which I had found myself existing back in late 1992 when I moved to the current town that I reside.  How could I ever live up to the potential that my parents always told me that I had, and how could I ever face the one Being that gave me such a protected and purposeful life when I was younger?  These questions and a billion more continually ran through my mind and dictated a good portion of my waking day and sleeping night, yet I always continued to rise and face another day as a mere mortal who had fallen into a likewise category that so many others had faced or were facing at that time.  I was miserable, had no confidence in my abilities as a human, as a husband, as a brother, or even as a son and with that, I started over.  I believed my worth had been taken away so deeply that I would never again understand what worth was or that I could ever be useful to anyone else all to the fact of my choosing and of my selfish choices sometime before this status was now my own and this is how my life would be remembered.

As my contact with more people increased, it became clear to me that I am not isolated in this condition of mine and that many others struggled with the same “condition” as I did.  It soon became apparent that two choices presented themselves to my life and once again I had to decide which direction I wanted to travel.  It was an easy choice this time and I chose to get out of the mud and clean myself off with God being the one who held the water hose this time.  As I watched person after person pass through my ED or laboratory, I made up my mind that I was not going to continue this death trap kind of lifestyle so I changed my attitude and allowed God to begin digging in my life, taking out the ugliness and turn my heart back to Him.  With all that had happened in my life, I sat back and wondered just how I became off-track with the idea that my life was worth nothing and that I could no longer adequately contribute to God’s Kingdom any longer?  No, I never contemplated suicide or just completely dropping off the face of the earth, but at this point in my life I had the thought of just existing and remaining a figment of everyone else’s memory, but God had other plans for me and in fact, His plan for His Kingdom was just getting started.

It was not until a few years later that I had an opportunity to stop and look around me and take notice of how my life and worth had returned.  To be honest, my worth had never been taken away from me for it was given to me even before I was born it was just hidden from me heart’s eyes because of the sin that I had allowed to infiltrate my life that caused me to believe that I had no worth and that it was gone forever.  It is this lie that our enemy uses to blanket our lives with self-worth alone and useless informative progress according to worldly standards, and sadly, it is through this lie he uses the advantage we give him and then gains complete access to our lives in which he attends to destroying us piece by piece.  It took me a while to see such mud and muck but I thank God every day that He brought me out of this condition before I reached the point of no return.

I know that many of us know about the story of Lazarus and how Jesus raised him from the dead, but have we looked at our lives through the love of Christ that He has for us according to this famous passage?  For the last few years, we have learned that God is a consistent God and that He cannot change His Ways no matter how much humans can preach differently.  God’s love for us began even before we were created, Jeremiah tells us this and since this truth is known and declared it means that God cannot change His Ways to satisfy our desires to fulfill our earthly desires.  But how does this passage tell us about issues that we deal with today including the ones that deals with our insecurities about God, His love for us and our eternal worth?  The verse that we are going to focus on is verse 3 where Lazarus’s sisters come to where Jesus was located and informs Him that Lazarus is sick.  A specific portion of this verse gives us the clue about our worth for it says “Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.”  This love was once again proclaimed in verse 5 where it says that Jesus did love Martha, her sister, and Lazarus.

So, as the story goes, Jesus returns to Judea and arrives what it seems too late to save Lazarus for he had been dead for three days.  We all know that Jesus commands Lazarus to come from the grave and that this miracle of Jesus bringing him back to life occurred.  One of the old heresies in the Early Church proclaimed that Jesus was not God and that He was only a human and did not represent God on any level.  It is through this miracle alone that proves such teachings false and that Jesus is part of the eternal and holy trinity; yet, part of the human race as well the perfect condition for an eternal Savior.  Another verse comes to mind about God’s love for people and that is John 3:16 where we have the clearest message from God concerning this matter.  It is this verse that specifically states that God loves the entire world and that this love was the single reason God sent His Son.  So, once again, God asks this question of how much are you worth?  As we shall see when we continue to study this passage in the Book of John, Lazarus is no good to Jesus dead, so He raises him and brings life back into his body, it is this worth of life that Jesus brought back and it is His motion of life-giving existence that reinforces the truth about our worth to God.

When Lazarus was in the tomb, it seemed to his loved ones that his life was over and that there was nothing else to be done.  This is a common state that many of us find ourselves in and tend to exist in such a lifeless manner.  When we believe such a condition exists in our lives it always means that the world has been allowed to infiltrate our presence for the world can only produce death as a result of anything.  It is this point that Jesus was making to Martha and Mary when it came to Lazarus because God represents nothing about death but of life and He desires for everyone to live both in the physical sense and in the spiritual realm.  See, God’s eternal Covenant goes totally against what the laws of the world operate within and it is this eternal Covenant that Jesus demonstrates here when He raises Lazarus from the dead.  We are all dead due to the sin that we inherit when we are born and it is our choice to accept the powerful Covenant of eternal life that comes from God alone or not.

Our lives are worth more than we can imagine and it is proven by the healing powers of Christ as shown to us in the passage of John 11:1-10 and through the well-known verse of John 3:16.  It is apparent that mankind is doomed to failure through our sinful existence but God has graciously provided an eternal escape plan if we only take it and live under its protection.  From the beginning, God’s Law has been in place to protect us from the world and to separate us from the world and not as a system of punishment.  Over the many millennia, humans along with the help of our enemy have perverted the meaning of such holy Law to make this Law the formidable enemy.  It is through God’s Law that our worth is defined and whether or not we understand it or not, the passages of reference in this article represent Gods Law.  God has one overall law for our lives and that was given to us in Genesis chapter 2 when He laid out the one command to Adam, that law has never changed and it is still in place today, obedience.

When you place the truth into our hearts about sin we cannot deny the fact that sin is death and cannot represent anything else but such.  God’s Law demands life and life abundantly and completely clashes with the laws of the world and it is through this battle between the two law states that proves God’s Love for our lives and just how much our lives are worth.  God had every bit of authority to wipe humans from the earth more times than just one, yet He chose to continue His work in our lives through His unbroken truth.  Do we understand that how we look at our worth directly depends on who rules within our hearts?  Sadly but honestly, I do not believe that many people who call themselves Christians believe this question or understand it because of how they live their lives as each day passes.

Over the past few moments we have learned that Jesus loved one of His fellow humans and while this should not come as a surprise to anyone, we must consider the fact that Jesus is consistent as His Father so that means Jesus loves you and me just the same as He does Lazarus.  As I have stated before I have never looked at this passage with such intent but God has the uncanny ability to allow us to see things not only for ourselves but for others to understand as well.  God also has spoken that He loves us as well, all of us which means that this includes everyone who existed, who exists today and who will begin their lives tomorrow.  While this love of God and His Son never waivers in any form, it does not give us the authority to comply with the ruler of the world by accepting factors into our lives that would deprive us of knowing the true existence of eternal love from our eternal Father. 

Yet, we have a tendency to believe the liar instead of the victor in a quest to continue our lifelong journey without any bumps and bruises.  It is this aspect of our quest that our enemy preys upon and when his claws are allowed to take hold begins to change our ways of acceptance and creates a divide from the eternal truth about our lives that brings shame and doubt to why we exist at all.  We can ill afford to forget that it is this same type of weapon that our enemy uses on us today that he used on Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and through this doubt he can manipulate ANY system that exists within our lives.  Doubt gives him the door to operate any type of organized or disorganized means of personal sabotage against your worth thus against the worth that God has given you.  This type of belief and acceptance is a defeated life and can have only one author, Satan.  God cannot be defeated nor can He create such sin, for He is always victorious in all that He is and does.

There is a wonderful song out now called “Still Rolling Stones” by Lauren Daigle and it fits right into play with the topic of this article and the message God wants you and I to fully understand.  What Jesus did with Lazarus is nothing short than a miracle and it cannot ever be denied as such but what is more important is that we understand that God loves us just as much as He does Lazarus and He wants us to never doubt this eternal love either.  If Jesus rolled away the stone of Lazarus and he came forth, then rolled away His own stone when He came forth what makes us doubt the love He has for you and I today?  We have the eternal Creator and His Son that vouches for us with every breath we take, so how can we devalue ourselves enough to warrant such worldly bribery?  You are a miracle and everyone knows it, but when we allow the enemy to invade deep enough to doubt that truth then we eventually reach the point where the doubt becomes our truth and not God’s truth.

I wish I could state that doubts about our worth will not come around but if I did so then I would be lying to you and not telling you what God wants to hear and to understand.  Yes, there will be times where we may think twice about our existence but it at this time where we draw from what we have learned about God and how His love for us gives us our worth.  It is also at this time that we know the Word of God well enough to know how to combat these attacks against us, for it is the knowledge of this Word that points out to our enemy that we know our worth and we believe in our worth that has been given to us.  There is a correlation here that we need to permanently fix into our heads and it deals directly with what we allow into our heads and then hearts.  In the Garden of Eden, all was perfect until Adam and Eve allowed the words of the world infiltrate their thinking which grew into their beliefs thus rendering their actions.  The same occurs in our lives if we allow it, the conditions and settings of the Garden of Eden did not change when they sinned, it was their lives that changed and had to leave.  The eternal protection of God has not changed today either, it is us who change our thinking about and our beliefs about who we trust and choose and it is this truth that is fixed.

If we take a hard look at our existence as the Church, can we see who actually has changed their thoughts and beliefs?  If for one second we have the inkling of the idea that God has changed His plan for our worth then we are gravely ill and need a repenting heart soon for we are on our eternal deathbed.  The only issue with that previous statement is that the modern Church DOES believe that God has changed His Ways and that He is now accepted another form of salvation for His people.  The CHURCH believes this!!  It is this lie from Satan that has come into our being and has destroyed countless amounts of lies in its wake.  For if anyone believes that God has lowered His standards for His people in any manner then you automatically believe that YOUR standards of creation and existence have been lowered as well.  If God would ever do such an act, then it would mean that His Kingdom would be divided and we know what happens to a divided kingdom.

Church, why do we promote such lies then?  Why do we water down God’s definition and the authority He has over our lives?  Why do we pursue the world’s values through biblical ideas and then expect the blessings of God to continue to rain down over our presence?  How foolish and blind can we be to believe such a lie?  Have we become so focused upon our physical existence that we have forgotten what God says about our lives?  How can we stand as a nation before God not to mention as individuals and ask for God to continue to cover us with His Covenant when we slap him in the face and spit on His beard?  Oh, Church, repent and allow God to open our spiritual eyes to see how far away from God we have strayed before it is too late.  Let us return to His Ways and live under His protection again before the storm becomes a mighty hurricane in which we will face without any protection.

It is clear that when any individual or organization becomes enthralled with the world, their ambitions become self-guiding and the value of life becomes “some girl in Iowa”.  God knows exactly who that “girl in Iowa” is and continues to love her very much and He holds her value so high that He would have sent His Son to die for her sins even if she was the only human being ever created.  “Some girl in Iowa” is the product of this world and it is the only result that the world can provide which is the exact reason this precious life in Iowa was snuffed out by someone who other ambitions for her.  God does not value death or disobedience in any way, He only values you and your eternal placement with Him and that is the ONLY reason for His Word and Ways.  Church, we are not completing this eternal reality we are playing games.  If we do not fulfill the plan of God and the mission of Christ in its entirety then we are devaluing not only the lives of others but our life as well.

DLB