Here Is What You’re Worth In God’s Eyes

by Kevin Burton

   Did you ever feel unworthy? Ever feel like a failure? A disappointment to yourself and to God? 

    When life wrestles you down and those kinds of feelings come, it’s helpful to know what God thinks of you and how He answers a question posed by King David of Israel. 

    This is the sixth installment of our series Ten Questions from the Bible. Today David asks the question, in Psalm 8, verses 3-4 (NKJV). It’s a question directed to God. Picture David looking up into a star-filled sky, contemplating the glory of God and the vastness of His creation. 

      “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visithim?”

   What indeed. I know my own shortcomings. Honesty compels me to report them. Surely God knows all about them. But there is a truth beyond my immediate grasp that I need to be reminded of constantly. Maybe you do too. 

   We get help on this from one of my favorite Contemporary Christian music bands 4Him and their song “Measure Of A Man.”

   Let these words sink in because 4Him didn’t get this from a Corn Flakes box, they got this from the Bible.

   “Well you can doubt your worth and search for who you are and where you stand. But God made you in His image when he made you in His hands.”

   “And He looks at you with mercy and He sees you through His love. You’re His child and that will always be enough.”

   “For there’s more to what you’re worth than you could ever comprehend.”

   Here is Mark Opperman, writing on www.sermoncentral.com.

   “As David looked up at the vastness of God’s universe, perhaps he felt his own smallness. So he asks God, ‘What is man that you are mindful of him?’” Opperman writes. “We are created beings fashioned in the image of our Maker.”

   Opperman sites two passages in the book of Genesis.

   “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Gen. 1: 27 NKVJ).

     “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2: 7 NKJV).

   Made with the breath of God, in His image. That is more than just wearing a shirt with God’s logo on the sleeve. This goes deeper. We are God’s workmanship (Eph. 2: 10).

   One of the sayings in the olden days when computers were just beginning to be a thing was “that does not compute.”  Remember that one?  That was the phrase for any dissonance in logic.

   I see that haven’t lived up to God’s standard, haven’t even lived up to my own standard, and God’s caring, attentive, unfailing love for me does not compute.  Somehow, I need to move past that.

   “We must learn to see ourselves as God sees us and know that he highly values us,” writes David Roper in “Teach Us To Number Our Days,” from Our Daily Bread Ministries. He illustrates to point with, of all things, a toy dog. 

   “Thirty years ago one of our sons adopted a rag dog he called Bow Wow.  Bow Wow was the most precious thing that boy possessed. He had toys of more intrinsic value but none did he love or value more.

   “Bow Wow was Linus’s blanket, Radar’s teddy bear, the Velveteen rabbit all rolled up in one.  Bow wow got dragged everywhere and in time became incredibly dirty and ragged. But my how he was loved!”

   “We are God’s rag dogs, precious beyond all measure because we are loved by the One who is love itself,” Roper writes.

    Feeling dirty and ragged like a rag dog? Remember you are greatly loved. You belong to God and that will always be enough.