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How
Much Are You Worth?
A sermon preached by Dr. Peter James
Flamming, Pastor
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
From the Sermon Series: "Questions Jesus Still Asks"
October 31, 1999
Text: Matthew 6 & 7
I invite your attention, please, to the
6th and 7th chapters of Matthew as we refer to verses
there. This is the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew is the first Gospel. The first
verse we will be looking at is 6:25. Please keep your Bible open as we proceed.
Well, it’s leaf-blowing time as the
beauty of the Fall moves across the land. Coming this morning for the 8:30
service, crossing the street, there was a gorgeous leaf right in the middle of
the walkway. I had to stoop down and pick it up. It was the only leaf anywhere
close. I held it up and thought to myself, with its many hues, only God could
make a leaf like that. And I didn’t have a thing to do with it. But when
you get a leaf blower and you put all of those leaves together in a pile, do you
have a tendency to walk over and pick up a whole bunch of leaves and say,
"Isn’t this wonderful?" There is something about the uniqueness of
every leaf. It is a parable of sorts because, you see, what God does when he
loves us, moves within us, develops us, and shares us, is he picks us up one at
a time. Now we’re all people just like leaves are all leaves. But there is
uniqueness about each one of us. What the world does is take all of us and put
us in a big old pile. The world treats us all alike.
Let me begin by shaping two words for
you. One of them is "world." When the New Testament uses
"world," it doesn’t mean the planet with its streams and oceans and
mountains. It means the world of people and culture that organized itself
outside of God. It is that world that pushes us in ways that will bleed us of
life and spirit and hope. The second word I point to is "worth." Worth
implies value, core, and center. When the New Testament uses "world"
it doesn’t mean the literal world you can see. The New Testament uses
"worth" in a way you can’t see either. It implies that which you are
deep within. But you can’t actually see that real you.
By the way, if you put "ship"
on a word it means skills. Leadership means you have skills in leading. If you
put worth and then put ship on the end of it you get worship. Worth, worship,
worshipping God is the opportunity to once again massage and explore the fact
that you are worth to God. Bethlehem, a cross, an open tomb.
How much are you worth? Even more
important, how do you calculate what you are worth? This is one place where you
either go the world’s way or God’s way. Take, for example, appearances.
Jesus had a lot to say about being so obsessed with the leaf-blowing value
system of appearances where we’re all supposed to look alike. Listen to Jesus.
In verse 25 He says: "Therefore I tell you do not worry about your life,
what you will eat or drink or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life
more important than food and the body more important than clothes?" Verse
27 says, "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?"
Jesus had a huge problem with the way
the world judges worth and he kept insisting that the way the world thinks and
values always produces worry. The quickest way to worry, according to Jesus, is
to buy into the way the world values things.
Appearance is one of the obvious. Jesus
is not here giving a critique on nutrition or on fashion, or on well being in
general. He is not telling you how to make a family budget. He’s not talking
about long-range planning. He’s talking about worth and value. And if you
think Jesus’ teaching about being hung up on appearance is misplaced, let me
ask you a question: How much time did you spend this morning preparing your
physical self for church today? Compare that with how much time did you spend
preparing your spiritual self for church today. Now young parents with small
children don’t count. They’re just glad they made it!
One reason for not building your
self-worth around how you look is that our sense of worth really comes from the
outside of us. From somebody who really values who we are and what we’re
about. And that’s why Jesus teaches us that God comes to us and decides our
worth, not by how we look, but how we are valued by Him, deep inside.
Her parents named her Barbara but
somewhere along the way she picked up the name "Barbie." Barbie had a
doll she loved with all of her heart and she called that doll Pandie. Pandie had
come to live at Barbie’s house one Christmas, when a cherished Aunt (in
Virginia, if your a new comer, it’s "awnt", not "ant".
Will you please straighten that out!) who lived Chicago, had purchased her from
a well known department store. Her face and hands were made of synthetic
material that made them look a little bit real. But Pandie’s body was stuffed
with soft material to make her feel soft, like a little baby.
When Pandie was young, she was
beautiful and Barbie loved her. In fact, Barbie loved her so much that Pandie
began to get old before her time. When it was bedtime Pandie got tucked in right
alongside Barbie. At lunch Pandie was there to watch her eat and when Barbie
could get away with it Pandie took a bath with her. From the doll’s point of
view, Barbie’s love was almost a "fatal attraction." Eventually
Pandie became anything but pretty. She had lost a good deal of her hair and one
of her arms was missing. In truth, she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her.
But for reasons only little girls know, Barbie seemed to love Pandie even more
after she was past her prime. Why, once the family went on vacation many miles
from home and on the way home it was discovered Pandie had been left behind.
There was nothing to do but to turn the car around and go back where they came
from. The desk manager knew nothing about a little doll named Pandie. They got
permission to get inside the room and they looked and Pandie was nowhere. Then
they went down in the basement and, sure enough, right before Pandie was about
to get washed to death, she was found in the sheets. And they went home with
everybody happy.
The years passed and Barbie exchanged
Pandie for a young man named Andy. Barbara’s father preferred Pandie to Andy!
In fact, he even claimed Pandie was much better looking, but he had absolutely
no influence. And when Barbie went to the University, Mama gave away a lot of
things, a lot of dolls and a lot of stuffed animals, but when she came to Pandie,
she just couldn’t do it. She packed her in a box and put her in the attic
where she stayed for many years. And then Barbie married and had a little girl
of her own named Courtney. And when Courtney got big enough, Courtney needed a
doll. Guess where Barbara--that’s what she was called now-- went to get
Courtney a doll? You got it. And so they took Pandie from the attic and sent her
to California where Barbara lived. And Barbara took her to a doll hospital. Yes,
they do have doll hospitals in California. And they gave her a face lift and new
hair and basically stuffed her with beauty and Pandie’s new caregiver,
Courtney, loved her just like Barbie had. In fact, she loved Pandie almost to
death. Some of her hair fell out and her arm was dislocated. And her digestive
system got lost along the way. It didn’t matter, though, because Barbie and
Courtney loved the doll, not because she was beautiful in appearance, but
because of what Pandie was to them. And their love, in their eyes, made Pandie
beautiful.
God doesn’t love you by how you look.
God loves you because of what you mean to Him. And it is God’s love returned
to you that gives you a sense of beauty that you would never have without God.
It doesn’t really have much at all to do with how you look on the outside.
Well there’s another way the world
can take its leaf-blower and make us into one great big hodgepodge. That is to
say you are worth how much you posses--how much you have. Now, if you go get a
loan from the bank or a mortgage company, they want to know your net worth. Take
how much you own, subtract how much you owe, and you come up with your net
worth. That kind of information is essential to a banker. That’s the world
they live in and they have to have that information. May I mention the world I
live in? The world I live in says that when we’re at the end of our lives and
the last days are being lived out nobody pays any attention to net worth. I’ve
never heard net worth mentioned in an intensive care ward. Never heard it
mentioned in a memorial tribute. It doesn’t appear in the obituary. It doesn’t
appear in articles. It doesn’t appear at the end of a family’s memories. You
see, it is an incredible experience that the world has such influence on us. We
spend all of our lives in one way or another dealing in this way or that with
our net worth, and when we have breathed our last it’s gone. Not even those
closest to us even remember it as who we are. God comes to us and says, don’t
get swallowed up in that.
Pay attention to your treasuring
habits. Listen to Him: "Don’t store up for yourself treasures on earth
where moth and rust destroy," and where the Fed can make interest rates go
up and Greenspan can move the markets and the Asian flu can make everything go
berserk. Don’t do that. Do your treasuring in God’s way and let that which
you have make a difference in somebody else’s life.
Well, we’ve talked about how we look
and what we have. What about what we do? Now Jesus gets very serious. Because
for Jesus, what we do is who we are. It is reflective on the deepest part of us
when it works its way out into our action. Listen to Jesus when he says in the 7th
chapter, "Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord" will enter
the Kingdom of Heaven. Only the one who does the will of my father." And
again in verse 24, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them
into practice…"
I remember in one of Hillerman’s
novels set in the Navajo Nation, Joe Leafhorn, who is the detective, is
interviewing someone about where they were at such and such a time and he begins
by saying, "Tell me about yourself." Immediately the person begins
talking about what they do. You see, this person was not a Navajo. Leafhorn
thinks to himself how different these people are from the way we are. If you ask
a Navajo about themselves, the first thing they will tell you is what clan they
belong to. If you ask us what we are about, we will tell you what we do. It is
part of us.
What you do reflects who you are. But
it has one critical weakness. It is tied to your ability to do it. I will never
forget a professional football player whom I became good friends with. He
attended our congregation some years back, but he never put his life together.
After he blew out a knee and couldn’t play anymore, he felt he had nothing,
because he was so tied up to the crowd and the cheers and the doing of it all.
Which brings us to God’s great gift. What you’re worth. You see, God comes
to you with that wonderful word we call "grace." God’s gift to you
is His grace which accepts and admires you for what makes you uniquely you. Not
for what you appear to be, what you possess, not even for what you do. You’re
valued by God’s grace just like you are, for by grace are we saved says Paul
in Ephesians 2. It is the Grace of God that comes to us and finally gives us our
worth and our beauty and our wonder and our uniqueness.
Richard Foster tells the story of a
father who took his two-year-old son out on a Saturday afternoon to give the
wife and mother a break, for she was carrying the second child. The father put
the boy in the car and it was such a rainy, yucky day that he decided to go to
the mall. When they got inside of the mall and they were walking around and
looking around the two-year-old complained and grumbled and whined and was
cranky and crabby. You see, two-year-olds like to be consulted. He hadn’t been
and he let everybody know about it. Now if you put yourself in that father’s
place, you have several options. For example, you can kneel down on one knee and
say, "Now son, you have no idea how fortunate you are to be with me."
In which case you’re not only dumb, you have no idea about the situation. Or
you could say, "There’s a candy store over there, let’s go see what
candy you’d like" That's not bad. But Mama’s probably not going to be
too pleased when you get home. Or you could go back to the car, strap him into
the car seat and just drive around and hope he goes to sleep.
But you know what that father did? That
father scooped that little boy up and pulled him close and he began to sing. He
wasn’t really a singer. He sang a love song and he was making up the words as
he went along. None of them rhymed and none of them fit and the tune changed all
the time but nobody could have noticed anyway, because he couldn’t carry a
tune. But when it all was put together this is really what he was singing:
"I’m so glad my boy. You’re my son and I love you. And you brighten up
my life when we’re together and I love you so, I love you so." And then
he’d change it and he’d say it a different way. And he’d put it all
together and his little son relaxed and captivated by this strange, wonderful
way of being treated. He just kind of molded into the wonder of his father.
Finally, when they had finished, and
his dad went to the car and buckled his son into the car seat, he got behind the
wheel and started the engine. His son raised both arms up and said, "No,
Daddy. Don’t go home yet. Sing it to me again, the part about me and you and
that you love me and I loved you and we were together." You see, that’s
God and you. Have you heard God singing to you lately? God’s singing, saying
you’re mine. You’re my son. You’re my daughter and I love you so. And you
bring me such happiness. And I’m happiest when we’re together.
What are you worth? Don’t ask the
world. Ask the Father in Heaven who loved you enough for a Bethlehem manger, a
cross on a hill and a tomb on a hillside. Thank you God, thank you. Let’s
pray.
Just now, let God’s love give you
that new sense of worth. Let God’s love surround you. Let God’s worth
surround you. Let his song enter your soul. Let God’s song say, "I’m
happiest when we’re together." Amen.
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