Driving across town, I had the Christian radio on when a lyric surprised me. It went something along the lines of, “Help me believe that I’m worth loving.” I’ve heard plenty of things like this before. It wasn’t that I was surprised lies like this were circling around the Christian community, I was more surprised someone believed it enough to put it in a song. The writer believed it enough to write it, the singer to sing it, the producers to produce it and the radio DJs to play it. It had to pass through several people in order for it to get to the place it where I could hear it on the radio. Each person who approved this song had, to some degree, bought into the lie that says that there is goodness inside humanity, and that we, somehow, are worth loving. They believed God was doing Himself a favor by extending love to us.
But biblically, nothing could be further from the truth. We are sin stained and sin soaked people. Not only do we sin constantly, but we also fail at doing anything good. God calls our “good” works “fifthly rags” in Isaiah 64:6. That means any righteousness we attempt to do on our own is disgusting to God. A life spent using man’s mere effort for good is like presenting trash before God in judgement day. He does not want to look at it. It’s not worth His time. God is not optimistic about the power of man.
If He was, the whole message of the gospel would shift. God would be the one getting the most out of the cross. He would be the lucky one. Man is magnified and God diminished. Again, nothing could be further from the truth.
But when we look at the Gospel in light of our hopeless situation, God is magnified. When you consider, truly consider, what great and powerful darkness man was in, to be rescued from that magnifies the rescuer, not the one getting rescued. Then if you add on we were the ones who got ourselves into this mess and we had acted out of rebellion against God, the rescuer becomes even greater because God had no logical reason to love us. Rather, He chose to love us out of His goodwill.
To believe that we are enough, that we are worth the love Jesus poured out for us, takes the glory due to God and directs it towards us. Instead of marveling at the wonder of Jesus’ love, we look to ourselves and say, “No wonder God saved me, He wanted me on His team.”
The cross is so amazing because Jesus died for those who had repetitively betrayed Him. He literally took on our sins. He was mocked in order to turn some of the hopeless human race into something holy, pure and full of purpose. The gospel should only exalt the love of God, never the position of man.
Instead of forming an attitude within ourselves that we are worth the love of God, let take on the wonder of David in Psalm 8 when he looks at the stars and exclaims, "What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?"
