The Measure of Your Worth

“The things you place your worth in that are not God himself, are not strong enough to bear the weight of your soul.”

Someone said that to me four years ago, and it never left me.

I was in college trying to find something to feel secure in--intelligence, talent, competence, earning potential. And it was leaving me completely anxious.

I was smart sometimes, I was talented sometimes, I was competent sometimes; but on other occasions, I was clueless, lost, and inadequate.

And there was always someone more intelligent, more talented, more competent, and making more money than me.

I could not find my footing.

If I’m not smart, what am I worth?
If I’m not contributing, what am I worth?
If I’m not successful, what am I worth?
If I’m not competent, what am I worth?
If I am not fill-in-the-blank, who am I?

I had no good answer to these questions until eventually I discovered a surprising concept that steered me to consider things anew: there are two types of vices. 

I was familiar with the first. Type 1 vices get most of the air time. Drugs, alcohol, etc. They are the numbing agents we use to escape life. Our culture shames their users.

Type 2 vices are gifts that become crutches--initially good things that we come to base our worth upon.

Maybe you are talented, which is how you are noticed. That is how you are deemed significant by your betters and your peers. You learn to think of yourself as a talented person who gets results. But on the days when your talent falters, so it seems does your worth.

In a performance-based culture like ours, we can insert any number of things for talent. Think wealth, beauty, success, or anything that appears to set our value.

For most of my life, I had not realized there was this second type. 

Type 2 vices are rarely called what they are. Obsessions or maybe even character flaws, but vices? But of course, that is what they are--crutches we lean on to prop up our self-worth.

They are our masters. We are their slaves. And they are insufficient. They are branches not strong enough to bear the weight of our souls.

This is why, perhaps more than anything else, Jesus seeks to change our minds about our identity. He teaches in stories and sermons and parables to convince us that we are His, we have been His, and He will not leave us. And the degree to which we can wrap our identity in His is the degree to which we’ll be free from every other insufficient one.

Our souls are like heavy, fragile, beautiful ornaments. The only thing strong enough to support their weight is their creator.

In Christ--which means being wrapped in God’s life that becomes ours--we become everything He is. Beloved, blameless, and worthy.

In this identity, we can let go of the things we’ve been relying on to give us worth. And we find that even in our incompetence, inadequacy, and lack, the King of the Universe points to us and says, you are my beloved child in whom I well pleased.