What Are You Worth?
For the last couple of weeks we have looked at the
miracle of Jesus’ raising a dead man to life in
Matthew 7:11-17. This week’s question is “What are
you worth?” What can we learn from this miracle to
help us understand how we are saved, how Christ finds
us, and what that means to us?
The question of “worth” becomes an important one as we
focus on the dead man’s mother who was now widowed.
In this culture and at this time period, a woman’s
worth was directly tied to a man. Women could not
have jobs which meant they could not create an income
to support a family. A woman’s value was in her
ability to bear children. Being the center of the
home in raising and nurturing her children was her
role.
This woman in Luke 7 had lost everything. She had
no role, no life support, no family, and no more hope.
Anything that was worth living for had all
disappeared. Death had taken her most valued
possessions.
This story, the story of the Good Samaritan, and many
others in the Bible help us to understand the
difference between “Do we find Christ?…or… Does Christ
find us?” Ephesians 2:1-6 and Romans 3:23 tell us
that because of sin, we are like the dead man in Luke
7 or the person who was beat up and robbed and
stripped and left for dead in the Good Samaritan. We
are like the widow who has no value, no worth, no
life. Since sin separates us from God, we are cut off
from his family. As dead people, we have no power or
ability to help ourselves. That is why Eph. 2:5 tells
us “it is by grace you have been saved.” It is Christ
that went to the dead man in Luke 7. It was the Good
Samaritan that went TO the person left for dead at the
side of the road. It is Christ who comes to us in the
flesh and rescues us by dieing on the cross for our
sins, so that we might be restored to life and once
again find meaning and purpose, value and worth. It
is God who shows us that we are more valuable than
anything in creation as he sacrifices his son for our
sins. It is because Christ finds us, even after we
willfully disobey him and separate ourselves from him,
that we see how much we are worth to God. We are
worth the life of his son.
So how do we respond? Our response should be the same
as those in Luke 7. The dead man arose and began to
SPEAK. The crowd recognized that God was visiting his
people in the form of Christ and they glorified him.
They too could not keep silent as they proclaimed his
message to Judea and all the surrounding countries.
Because of how much God loves us, because of how much
he values us, because of how much we are worth to him,
he comes to us in Jesus. Jesus stretches out his arms
on the cross as we nail his hands and feet and says,
“This is how much you are worth.”
William Hiskey
DCE, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Bowling Green, KY
Updated: 07/22/03
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