Tag: Our Awesome Value

The other day, I saw a simple man doing a simple thing. Stationed at a busy intersection, he held up a sign, energetically waving it back and forth, up and down, blessing passersby in all directions with a priceless pronouncement free for the taking. Its message? “Smile because you are awesome.” People honked in approval, grinning from ear to ear, some perhaps as brightly as he. I thought, how refreshing his message in times like these, and how stirring the passion in which he proclaimed it. What a relief from the divisions among us and the negativity around us. This is what unity looks like, even if in a humanistic sense. One man reaching thousands with nothing but a whiteboard and conviction. A remarkable man doing a remarkable thing.

Yet we know from Scripture “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”¹ and “there is no one who does good, not even one.”² Indeed “all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags.”³ So, how are we then “awesome”? How do we reconcile “smile” with “unless you repent, you too will all perish”⁴? Is the Bible merely a killjoy, raining on our parade of positivity?

Not at all. So great is our God that He commands our awful nature of sin to prove our awesome value to Him. How so? Paul writes, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”⁵ John echoes, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”⁶ We are made in His image and purchased with His life. Of what value must we be to God, that He would redeem our sinful selves at a cost so incalculable that only He could know and only He could pay? Nothing less than awesome.

So, believe it, receive it, embrace it, and smile!

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”—Psalm 8:3-5 ESV  

Father, though my sins were like scarlet, you have made them white as snow.⁷ How great your love for me, and how precious my life to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Amen.

¹ Romans 3:23 ESV
² Psalm 14:3 NIV
³ Isaiah 64:6 NIV
⁴ Luke 13:3 NIV
⁵ Romans 5:8 NIV
⁶ 1 John 4:10 NIV
⁷ Isaiah 1:8