What Is My Self-Worth - 5

Welcome to Turning Point Weekend Edition. The world says you're only worth as much as your bank account and brand names, but what does your Creator say? Today, Dr David Jeremiah explains why that's the only answer that matters. Listen as David shares his message, What is My Self Worth?

Thank you for joining us for the Weekend Edition of Turning Point. Today, we're going to talk about a question that I hear a lot over the years. I've heard it many times.

What is my self-worth? What does it mean? What does that question mean? And does there happen to be an answer for it in the Bible? There's an answer in the Bible. Psalm 139 gives us some great insight into our self-worth, and it's our subject on the Weekend Edition of Turning Point, beginning right now. It should not surprise many of us today that there are countless thousands of people who are going through identity crises everywhere you look, spending thousands of dollars to go to therapists and counselors to find out who they are, why they're here, and if they're worthy, trying to discover their self-worth, trying to find a reason for continuing the struggle to just keep going. And, of course, we shouldn't be surprised at that, because given the evolutionary theory that seems accepted by most people these days, why we are just a tiny speck on the vast universe, we're struggling mortals on an obscure planet, located in a second-rate galaxy among billions of other galaxies, I mean, how important could we really be? You know, I've never been so excited about a portion of God's Word as I have become about the 139th Psalm, because here in this Psalm, David writes out of his experience of struggling with and dealing with this very question, who am I, and how can I find my worth? Man is only man in relation to God. The only thing that makes us different from the rest of the animal kingdom is that God has breathed into us His Spirit, that God has given us His image, and however we want to define that image, it is the one thing that sets us apart from everyone else, from everything else. We are created in the image of God. We respond to God, and that is because God has placed His imprint upon Him. If that is true, we should not be surprised to discover that our worth as human beings has something to do with Him.

Amen? And I want to show you how the psalmist takes this wonderful portion that we have before us and in three or four different sections reminds us of who we are as far as God is concerned. And I want to say four things to you today. Number one, your self-esteem comes from the fact that God knows you. He knows you.

You know, think of the most important person in all of the world, the person everybody would just be in awe. God is beyond the importance of that person, as far beyond that importance as you can possibly consider in your mind, and yet listen to me. God knows you. Listen to the writing of the psalmist. O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up.

You understand my thought far off. You comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways, for there is not a word on my tongue. But behold, O Lord, you know it all together. You have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

It is high and I cannot attain it. And I've written down in my notes, here is the way God knows you. Number one, God knows what you do. In verse two, he says, Lord, you know my down sittings and my uprisings. This is a reference to the activity of life.

It is an Old Testament expression that talks about the routine of life, the going in and the coming out. God knows your activities. In essence, David is saying that God knew him in his active life and in his passive life. God knew what he did. Secondly, God knows what you think.

Notice verse two, you understand my thoughts are far off. The psalmist says before you ever think your thoughts, God knows what they are. God knows your subconscious life and that is why we read in the New Testament that your father knoweth what things you have need of even before you ask.

God knows what you think. And thirdly, the psalmist says God knows where you go. He says in verse three, you comprehend my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

God knows all about your habits and what things you have need of and God knows all that's going on in your life. Number four, God knows what you say. Verse four says, for there is not a word on my tongue, O Lord, but you know it altogether. Now that's kind of frightening, isn't it? Have you said any words this week? That it kind of embarrasses you that God knows them?

I mean, I'm not trying to make you feel guilty, but that's an awesome thought, isn't it? God knows everything that you say. And finally, God knows what you need. In verse five, it says you have hedged me behind and before and laid your hand upon me.

This is an Old Testament idiom that it's rich in imagery. He says you have hedged me in like a city that is under siege. You are providing for and caring for me even when you do not realize it. He knows your past. Thou has hedged me in from behind. He knows your future. Thou has hedged me in before and he knows your present. You have your hand on me right now. So stop and think about it for a moment.

How important are you? God knows you. He knows what you do, what you think, where you go, what you say, what you need. And when David thought about this, it was so overwhelming to him that we read in verse six, he said, such knowledge is too wonderful for me.

It is high and I cannot attain it. David said there was only one thing left for me to do when I finally realized, God, that you knew me and out of all the billions of souls on this earth, you knew me better than I know myself, better than I am known by anybody else, that, God, you know me. He said it is so wonderful. I can do nothing but fall down and worship. You know, sometimes truth about God is like that. There's no way to respond to it.

There's no way to write a critique of it. When you just finally understand it, you just want to fall on your knees and say, God, you are too wonderful. How can I comprehend it? So the next time you're wondering about your own self-worth, if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you can pull your shoulders back and say, hey, God knows me. He knows me. But the second thing the psalmist wants us to understand is that God is near you.

He not only knows you, he is near you. For in these next six verses, he asks the questions, where can I go from your spirit or where can I flee from your presence? Quite often these verses have been used as an evangelistic thrust to help us understand that we can never get away from the hound of heaven, that he will chase us down the corridors of life until finally he catches us and that like Jonah of old, we can never get on a ship that will take us away from God. He will always find us.

And that's true. But there's a wonderful positive application of this portion of God's word as well. For what David, I believe, is talking about is not so much the pursuing God but the present God. He is saying to us that God is everywhere.

He is not everything. That's pantheism. But God is everywhere. And in his poetic style, he researches the universe as if to go through a checklist and find out if there's any place that he could imagine where God might not be. He says, I've gone to the heavens and I've gone to Sheol and, God, you were there.

Here are the two extremes, the heights of heaven and the depths of Sheol, the place of living in light and the abode of death and darkness. God, when I go there, you are there. And it surprises some of you, I know, to think of God in Sheol. Let me remind you, God will be with you wherever you go from now throughout eternity, either as the one around whom you have wrapped your worship and love or as the thought in your mind throughout eternal days of the one you rejected all the time you had a chance to know him.

God will be in your mind forever in heaven or in Sheol, says the psalmist. And then he adds, not only is God in the heights and in the depths, but he is in the east and in the west. There's a curious expression in this next verse. He says, if I take the wings of the morning, you are there. And if I dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even your hand shall be there. And if you study that in the language of the Hebrew, what you'll find out is that the wings of the morning are a reference to the east where the sun comes up. And if I go to the furthest parts of the sea is a reference to the Mediterranean Sea, which was further west than Palestine, and David is looking at the universe as he sees it and he says, God, you're in the east and you're in the west. I can't get away from you.

You're everywhere. You're on the land and you're on the sea. And then he says, well, maybe if God could somehow be isolated to darkness and light, there would be a way that he could not be nearest. But he goes on to say, if I say, surely the darkness shall fall on me, even the night shall be light about me. Indeed, the darkness shall not hide from you, but the night shines as the day.

Now watch this. The darkness and the light are both alike to you. God, you're in the light and you're in the darkness because with God there is no difference between light and darkness. And the point that the psalmist wants us to get is this.

Listen up now. God is near you wherever you go. You can't get away from him. You can't go to a place where God is not.

And I don't know what that does for you, but boy, I'll tell you what. If you get your worth from being near important people, you are near God and he is near you. And what that means and the exciting truth is that he is immediately accessible to you wherever you go. When God designed to send his son into this world as his picture to us of who God is, a name was given to him that we cherish, especially at Christmas time. He's called what? Emmanuel.

And what is that? God with us. God is with us. And the psalmist wants us to understand that you cannot hide from God, but he also wants us to understand that God is near us. So you get your self-esteem from the fact that God knows you and that God is near you.

Here's the third one. And basically this is the centerpiece of the whole psalm. You get your self-esteem and your self-worth from this truth. God made you. He created you. You are the incredible creation of the infinite God. And I almost just took this section and put all the rest of it aside and just dealt with this because what a wonderful truth it is. The psalmist says, Oh God, you have formed me and my inward parts and covered me in my mother's womb.

Saint Augustine once wrote, he said, Men go abroad to wonder at the height of the mountains and at the huge waves of the sea and the long courses of the rivers at the vast compass of the ocean and at the circular motion of the stars and they pass by themselves in their wonder. Isn't it interesting that in the first six verses, the psalmist is talking about God's omniscience. He knows everything. In the second section, he's talking about God's omnipresent.

He is everywhere. And in this section, he's talking about God's omnipotence. He's all powerful. Now listen, when he wanted to use an illustration of his power, he didn't choose the vast universe with all of its stars and galaxies and planets, but he chose the crowning creation called man. And he says, let me show you how powerful is God.

Let me show you man. And he says, man has been in the heart and thought of God from the very moment of his conception. God is involved with the conception of each of us. He says in verse 13, for you have formed my inward parts and have covered me in my mother's womb. These words describe reproduction in some of the most meaningful and tender verses in all of the Bible.

If we read them honestly, we understand that they contain the secret for an incredible sense of self-worth. Listen to me, God knew you before you were born and he knows the moment when you were conceived, he knows the very beginning of your life. God was involved in it all.

In every phase of development from that moment on, he is there. So I want to tell you something in case you haven't heard it recently from this pulpit, that the human embryo is not the result of a biological accident. God is aware of the union of the sperm and the egg and the attachment of the embryo to the uterine lining and the development of human life. And God formed the inward parts and arranged the genetic structure and possesses our reigns and God is in conception. And we believe that the Bible teaches that human life begins at that moment. And God knows about that human life and God loves that human life from the very moment of that union.

And God is involved with the development of it. Read verses 14 and 15 with me. He says, I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well. Do you know that the psalmist tells us that God protects even at birth our individuality? The word wonderfully in that little phrase, fearfully and wonderfully made, you know what that word means?

The word literally in the Hebrew language means you are fearfully and differently made. And you know, we can look around and we can joke about this sometimes and we can say, boy, is she different. Or boy, is he different. Let's face it, we're all different. There has never been two human beings created anything alike. God has made us fearfully and uniquely. We are all stamped with our own special genetic code that sets us apart from every other human being on the face of God's earth. And out of the billions of people, the billions of souls, God made certain that every one of us would be special, wonderfully, uniquely made. And then not only does he protect your individuality, but he protects your identity in the whole process of life. In verse 15, he says this, my substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lower parts of the earth. The word substance here is a key word.

It means frame. It refers to the complete structure of the adult person. According to David, now listen up, according to David, the full-grown body had actually been planned, designed, and programmed when it was not even large enough to be visible in the unseen parts of the earth, says David. Before you were born, the whole genetic plan of exactly what you would be as an adult was set by God, and scientists in molecular biology have not too long ago discovered this, and we call it DNA. And I've read so much about this this week.

I mean, I feel like bowing down and worshiping God a whole new way. I discovered some incredible things. Do you know that in every cell of your body, there is enough information to recreate your adult person as if there were no other cell necessary? And that every time that cell divided in the process of your growth, all of that information was contained in each cell that was a part of the division. And there is so much information in each cell that if they just had the one, they could recreate your whole adult person. And someone has reasoned that if all of the instructions in one cell, in the genetic code, in the DNA of one cell, if all of those instructions were written out, it would take 1,600-page books to put all that information down in writing. God put it in a cell that no one could see except with magnification. And it's in every cell in your body.

It's incredible. In fact, the DNA strands are so fine and so unique that if you put them all together from one human body, they would fit into a size of an ice cube. And yet, if you spread them out end to end, they would go from the Earth to the sun and back 400 times. That's how much information is in one cell of the human body. God did it! And he did it so that you would have your identity. You are unique. You are individually precious to God. And not only does he protect your individuality and protect your identity, in the very process, he protects your importance. He says you are so important that all of your days were written in his book before one of them came to be.

Isn't that incredible? God knew everything about you before you ever started out in life, and he has your whole life charted. He knows everything there is to know about you. You are so important to him. Your self-esteem comes from the fact that God knows you, that God is near you, that God made you, but watch now.

Your self-esteem comes from the fact that God, right now at this very moment, listen to me, he is thinking of you. In the great mind of God, he is thinking of you. Did you ever call somebody you love who's a long way away?

And what do you say to that person? Just want you to know, I'm thinking of you. Thinking of you. If you can't be in somebody's presence all the time, it's good to be in their thoughts, but the psalmist says we're in God's presence and we're in his thoughts. And the psalmist says the way God thinks of us is so incredible that he can't comprehend it. He said if I tried to number up the ways you think concerning me, I wouldn't be able to do it, but God, even when I'm not aware that you're thinking of me, you're thinking of me because I go to sleep, but God, you never sleep. All during the time that I'm sleeping, you're thinking of me, and when I wake in the morning, there you are, and your thoughts are of me. I want to tell you something. You are so valuable and so incredibly important to God that he knows you, and he stays near you, and he made you, and he's right now thinking of you. God has you in his mind and in his heart.

You are only man in relation to God. Let me finish all of this and try to help us really come to grips with this story. During World War II, when the Germans were bombing London until it looked as if London would not survive the massacre, there were many episodes of heroic courage that found their way into the English history books. During one period of the bombing, I am told, the German bombers flew attacks on London for 57 consecutive nights, bombing that city eight hours at a time. They had over 1,500 bombers that came, and each night they would come in waves of 250 at a time, just blowing the center of London away. And it looked as if it was only a matter of time until the whole city and its culture would be destroyed, with the possible exception of one thing that stood in their way, and that was the Royal Air Force. The Royal Air Force sent up their hurricanes and their Spitfires to fly around those huge bombers from Germany, and the English people took their hope and their courage from those brave fliers. Every once in a while, these maneuverable planes would fly into position and shoot down one of the German bombers, and the whole land would rejoice. And when these men came home for their time away, they weren't the national heroes.

They couldn't walk down the streets in London without being mobbed by the citizens who wanted to express to them their appreciation for their courage. Unfortunately, many of these Royal Air Force people, many of these men paid a living price for their sacrificial service to their country. You see, the hurricane was a marvelous plane, but it had one basic problem, and that is this prop-driven fighter plane, the engine was just a few feet from the cockpit. And if that plane ever took a direct hit, oftentimes the plane would burst into an infernal of flames.

And while the pilot could eject and get out of the plane because the fuel lines came up alongside of the cockpit to the engine, in the two seconds that it would take for him to pull the lever and reject, there would be such intense heat in the cockpit that it could basically erase all of the features of his face. And many of these handsome young Air Force pilots came out of that fray, and they had their noses burned off and their eyelids burned off and sometimes their ears scorched off and many times their cheeks and their skin just taken from their face. And they were sent back to the military hospitals and there they had to undergo consecutive plastic surgeries to try to repair the damage and put back together some kind of feature that they could go home with. And many of these men, even though they were admired for their bravery, went back to periods of great loneliness. One pilot by the name of Peter Foster described what it was like to go through the surgeries and prepare to reenter public life.

And this is what he said. He said, your fears and concerns came to focus in the mirror every day. For months you used the mirror as an objective measuring device to scrutinize the progress your surgeons had made. You studied the scar tissue, the odd wrinkling of the skin, the thickness of the lips, the shape of the nose, and from this survey you asked for certain adjustments to improve appearance.

And the doctors tell you whether or not they can make this adjustment. But he said, nearer to the time when you knew you were going to be released, your view of the mirror changed. And now as you gaze at the reflections of a new face, not the one you were born with, but an inferior imitation, you try to see yourself as strangers will see you.

In the hospital you've been the object of pride, supported by the camaraderie of your friends and the ministrations of the staff. On the outside you will be a freak, and fear creeps into your spirit. Will any girl dare to marry this face?

Will anyone give this face a job? And at that critical moment, said Peter Foster, one factor alone begins to matter to you, the response of your family and your intimate friends. The surgeon's success in rebuilding your face doesn't really matter anymore, because your future hinges on the reactions of those who are closest to you.

Will they love you and accept you, or will they hold you at arm's distance because of the changes in your facial features? Peter could write this because he was one of the fortunate ones. His girlfriend came to the hospital where he was soon to be released and insisted that they be married before they left the hospital. And she told him in no uncertain terms that she loved him, not his facial membranes. And when Peter returned home, he came home on the arm of somebody who loved him for who he was. But of course he came home to face some pretty painful rejection too. Some of his adult friends would look away quickly. You've known that as you've seen that happen.

And some of the children, not trained, not taught, teased him with cruelty and laughter and mocked him. But Peter Foster said, whenever that would happen, I would always look to my wife, and she was the one who gave me the image of myself. And he said, even now to this day, regardless of how I feel, if I begin to feel unworthy, I just look to her, and she gives me a warm, loving smile that tells me I'm okay. And Psalm 139 is God's loving smile to you.

You are okay. He knows you. He's near you. He made you.

He's thinking of you. You're worthy because God is smiling on you today. We hope you enjoyed today's Turning Point weekend edition with Dr David Jeremiah. You can hear this and other programs and get more information about our ministry by downloading the free Turning Point mobile app for your smartphone or tablet or by visiting our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. That's davidjeremiah.org slash radio. You can also view Turning Point television on Free To Air Channel 7 too Sunday mornings at 8 and on ACC TV Sundays at 6.30am and Fridays at 1pm. We invite you to join us again next weekend as Dr David Jeremiah shares another powerful message from God's Word here on Turning Point weekend edition.