“I Value You for Who You Are”
Genesis 1:26-27
Psalm 8
Introduction
We make value judgments every day about all sorts of things. We choose one product over another product. We choose one TV news program over another. We think carefully before investing a huge amount of money in a new car.
Values are judgments about how important someone or something is to us. We refer to social values, religious values, or “family values.” Each one of these is a value statement.
To value means we consider someone or something to be important or beneficial. It means we have a high opinion of someone or something. In order to help us make value judgments we develop a personal system for valuing someone or something. We call this a values system because it is a person’s principles or standards of behavior in making these choices.
We tend to value everything in terms of money. I thought you would be interested in what dollar value you are.
The US Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the value of a human life at $9.1 million, up from $6.8 million during the Bush era. The Food and Drug Administration's current estimate is $7.9 million, up from $2.9 million since 2008. Meanwhile, the transportation Department is sticking with its $6 million figure. Generally though, experts say the long-term trend is upward, with top human matter fetching big dollars. A lung alone goes for over $100,000 USD. Add to that bone marrow, extracted antibodies, blood and sperm donations, female eggs, bio-voltage, medical testing opportunities, lifetime taxation, ears, eyes, knees, hearts, livers and future earning potential and it all starts to add up. If you are feeling like a million bucks though, you shouldn’t.
The only real authority on a human body's worth is the periodic table. It says a corpses’ raw resources are worth about a dollar. Sulfur probably has the most value once the water is drained. It’s used to make matches. That said, there is still reason to believe in a corpse's inflated worth. A recent report financed by the Department of Homeland Security suggested that preventing a death from terrorism now costs 100 percent more than other deaths.
Let’s see what your non-monetary value is according both to the world and according to God.
I. Who You Are According to the World
A. You live in a universe that happened by chance and has no purpose.
In his TV program Cosmos, Carl Sagan made this comment:
"Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people."
Sagan went on to say that only matter is eternal. There is nothing outside the universe, there is no God or other supernatural being.
B. The world says you are a person that just happened by chance without any purpose.
You are a complex “machine.” Your personality is the result of chemical and physical properties interrelating in ways we do not fully understand.
You are physical matter and do not transcend the universe in any way. There are no eternal values. Values are created by human beings. You have no value in and of yourself.
Morality is situational. What is moral or immoral depends upon the circumstances and who is involved. The good, the true, the perfect exist only as things that help our human species survive. And finally, death ends everything. There is no heaven, no hell; there is nothing.
C. Your personal value is what society gives you.
You have no value in and of yourself. You have to prove you have value to the world, or retreat into your inner self and live in some kind of psycho-babble world to find your value.
Some people spend a lifetime trying to find a way to feel they are of value. Some people believe they have value in a job, but if job is lost, their value is lost. Some people believe they have value in physical appearance, but if physical appearance is lost, their value is lost. Some people believe their value in wealth, but if wealth is lost, their value is lost. Young people go along with the gang for this makes them feel they have value.
Some years ago, Time Magazine featured a story about Peter Sellers, a well-known English actor. The article was about him appearing on the Muppet Show and being interviewed by Kermit The Frog. Kermit began the interview by telling Sellers to relax and be himself.
Peter Sellers responded that he couldn’t be himself because he didn’t know who he was. The real Peter Sellers didn’t exist." His words were rather sad. One of his long time friends, commenting on those words, said Sellers had become an amalgamation of all the stage & screen characters he had ever played.
Peter Sellers wasn’t alone in his feelings. I’m convinced that many people go through life wondering who they are, what they are supposed to be doing, and where they are going.
In five years as pastor of a church on the outskirts of London, I had to deal with 17 suicide attempts. One girl succeeded. There were other attempts that I had no dealings with. Why so many suicides in a blue-collar borough of 60,000? If you believed that you personally had no purpose, that you were here by chance through an evolutionary process that had no purpose, and that you were a mere speck in a vast impersonal, meaningless universe, would you think you had a future? If you had no future, why wait around for meaningless years for death to end it all? Just end it right now and get it over with.
If the world were to say, “I value you for who you are,” what would it sound like? I believe it would be something like this:
I value you for who you are: a sex object.
I value you for who you are: a servant to do my bidding.
I value you for who you are: someone I can take advantage of.
I value you for who you are: someone I can ignore.
I value you for who you are: a worthless accident in a meaningless universe.
I value you for who you are: someone I can do away with, just as Hitler did away with 6 million useless Jews.
II. Who You Are According to God
God gives you value and no one can take it away. You have value in and of yourself.
A. You are valuable to God because of creation
Psalm 8 tells us that God is the creator of all things. The universe is no accident.
When I look at the sky, which you have made,
at the moon and the stars, which you set in their places—
what are human beings, that you think of them;
mere mortals, that you care for them?
Yet you made them inferior only to yourself;
you crowned them with glory and honor.
You appointed them rulers over everything you made;
you placed them over all creation:
sheep and cattle, and the wild animals too;
the birds and the fish
and the creatures in the seas.
God is eternal and is revealed in and through his creation. "Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities,
both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made." [Romans 1:20]
"How clearly the sky reveals God’s glory! How plainly it shows what he has done!
Each day announces it to the following day; each night repeats it to the next." [Psalm 19:1-2]
God created an orderly universe out of nothing and he is constantly involved in the ongoing operation of the universe. God put into the universe the biological systems that produce and sustain life. God has purpose for his creation and humans were created for God’s purpose.
B. You are valuable to God because you bear his image
We are personal because God is personal. This means
• We can choose to act.
• We have a capacity for recognizing and understanding good and evil.
• We have intelligence.
• We have a desire and capacity for community.
• We have creativity.
• We have dignity, created only inferior to God.
• Human beings can know both the world around them and God.
God has built in us the capacity to know him and he takes an active role in communicating with us. We cannot know everything about God, but God communicate to us in revelation through Scripture and the Holy Spirit
Human values are derived from eternal values that reflect the moral nature of God.
The Declaration of Independence has these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
“Unalienable Rights” is the way our Founding Fathers said the same thing I have said: you have value in and of yourself because God gave them to you.
C. You are valuable to God because of Jesus
The clearest evidence that God cares for man is that He sent Jesus to die for our sins, so that we may share in His purposes. Sin is more than a particular behavior; sin is not meeting God’s standard.
We repeat the sin of Adam and Eve. Their sin was not eating an apple; theirs was the sin of wanting to be equal with God. We need no more evidence of our sin than to recognize that we do not live up to our own standards of behavior. Adam and Eve did not lose God’s image, but over the aeons that image has been beaten, bruised, and dirtied to the point that we can hardly recognize it in people.
Jesus came, lived, and died to restore the image of God to its original brilliance. The writer of Hebrews stated that
We do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, so that through God’s grace he should die for everyone. We see him now crowned with glory and honor because of the death he suffered. [Hebrews 2:9]
Theologian Helmet Thielicke has written: “God does not love us because we are valuable; we are valuable because God loves us.” [Nihilism, p. 110]
There was a girl in England who was going to a pastoral counselor because she had no sense of personal value. She had never known her father and mother. She had been moved from one foster home to another until she was old enough to be put on her own.
The counselor would carefully take the girl back into time and ask her to tell him what was happening. For example, he might say, “Today is your eighth birthday. Tell me what is happening.”
The counselor seemed to be getting nowhere until one day he said, ”Today you have just been conceived. Your mother doesn’t know it, your father doesn’t know it, and they could care less. But God knows it, and He loves you.” That was the road to the girl’s finding her personal value, that God loved her in spite of everyone and everything that had happened to her.
Conclusion
Now you should know who you are and who other people are:
I value you for who you are: a person who bears the image of God and who can relate to God personally.
I value you for who you are: a person whom God loves and to whom he gives a purpose for being in the world.
I value you for who you are: a person for whom Christ died in order for you to have a life with meaning.
I value you for who you are: a person with gifts and opportunities that can make a difference in the world and the lives of people.
I close with this testimony of a woman who has had her own struggles with her true value in life.
I am a woman, a mom, daughter, sister, cousin, friend, teacher, student, etc, but I tend to be classified at the moment as Divorced, and even though most people don't seem to discriminate, it has closed certain doors to me within the Christian community. I HAVE to know that Jesus loves me for who I am in His sight, according to His Word, and to learn to move forward under that Truth, because the world is full of white noise.
This morning you can say “no” to a world that strips you of any value, and say “yes” to Jesus and find your true value.
