2 posts tagged “value”

Over the weekend we visited Stockdales in Poland and this morning was Stockdale's house church meeting, it was a great time.

Jack shared on the idea of God's value system as we can see in 1 and 2 Peter. He shared on 5 things that are valuable and precious in God's sight according to Peter:

1. Our faith (1 Peter 1:7)
2. Us (1 Peter 1:18-19)
3. Jesus as our cornerstone (1 Peter 2:5-8)
4. Our character (1 Peter 3:3-4)
5. His promises (2 Peter 1:3-4)

Two things struck me. One was the thought I've had before that when a "buyer" declares a price on something, it makes the object valuable relative to (subjective to) the buyer. However, when God declares something to be valuable, it thereby has objective, intrinsic value. The example that comes to mind is that piece of toast where someone thought you could see an image of Mary on its side that that casino paid tens of thousands of dollars for on Ebay. Its intrinsic value was still that it was a simple piece of toast. But our intrinsic value is determined by God's declaration that we are truly worth the life of His Son.

The second thing that struck me was simply the verse in 1 Peter 2 that says "anyone who believes in Him will never be disappointed (= put to shame)". That's a quote from Isaiah 28:16. What an incredible promise. It of course mustn't be understood as meaning that we'll never be emotionally disappointed, but rather that God will never let us down, and we will never. ever. regret trusting in Him in any and every situation.

Lord, transform my mind that it may increasingly reflect your value system.

I was listening to the Mark Driscoll teaching on "Death By Love - Reflections On The Cross", and was really touched by Mark's passion for not "emasculating" the offensiveness of the cross, not hiding the "bad" news about our sin and the wrath of Holy Almighty God.
One part of the teaching, however, struck especially close to home. He was talking about how he heard a guy on Christian radio on Easter Sunday compare the cross to investment banking, basically saying that the cross shows how valuable we are, that God knew the cross was worth it, because we are of such high value to God. Mark said he just went ballistic seeing the cross being misused to place humans and humans' value at the center of the cross.

What struck home is that I distinctly remember having eerily similar thoughts about our value and the cross as the guy on the radio. Check it out here. Note I didn't use the investment banking example, but basically my thought went along the lines of the fact that because God declared that the price for us would be the death of His Son, He thereby also declared our value to be worth the death of His Son.

Now I've been wrestling with this ever since I heard the teaching. Am I over-emphasizing our value as people - going in the direction of humanism?

Then today God gave me a great thought which kind of cleared stuff up for me:

The cross does not prove our value, rather the cross gives us value.

That is, without the cross, we all have become truly worthless (2 Kings 17:15, Romans 3:12). However, one thing that happened at the cross was that God gave us worth and value while we were worthless (Romans 5:8). In other words, yes, my thoughts I had back then are still true: The thing to remember, though, is that without the cross and without that declaration of our value, we are all worthless. Our value is completely dependent upon the cross and the objective love of God.

So we have yet one more tension in the Christian life to keep in mind: Without the cross, we would have been worthless because we all turned from Him, but with the cross, God declared us to be as valuable to Him as His own Son. Our value is not the centerpiece of the cross, nor the reason for the cross, rather it is one of many consequences of the cross.