Turning Point

David Michael Jeremiah: The world says you're only worth as much as your bank account and the brand names in your closet and garage. Is that how you measure your worth? Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah explains why the only measure of worth that really matters isn't seen through the world's eyes, but through your creator's. Listen as David introduces today's message, "What Is My Self-Worth?".

Dr. David Jeremiah: Thank you for joining us at the beginning of a new week. We are tackling some of the questions people have that are answered for us in the Book of Psalms. Today is Part 1 of "What Is My Self-Worth?" from Psalm 139. We will talk about some really interesting things during this month of broadcasts, and I hope you'll be with us every day.

We want you to know that during the month of May, we have a brand new book that we'd like to share with you. It's a beautiful hardback book produced by Turning Point, and it's called *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It's 236 pages and it's based upon these impeccable Psalms that deal with the questions we have. It's amazing to read the Psalms, which many people do in a meditative way, but the Psalms are filled with positive, practical truths that we can follow every day.

This book that we're offering during this month is especially true to that point. These are very practical Psalms that will help you, and I hope you'll take advantage of the opportunity during the month of May when you send a gift of any size to Turning Point to ask for your copy of *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. Today we're talking about "What Is My Self-Worth?", so let's get started with that from Psalm 139.

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. They are 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, 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?

And so in our Western culture, what we've tried to do is decide that the worth of a person is determined on the basis of how much society is willing to pay for his services. In the athletic realm, for instance, if you can throw a 95-mile-an-hour fastball most of the time and get it over the plate, you can knock down a pretty decent salary. In fact, a multi-million dollar deal is probably out there waiting for you.

Or if you're a quarterback and you can hit fleet wide receivers in stride 50 or 60 yards down the field and keep from getting killed by the onrushing linemen, you are guaranteed a multi-million dollar, multi-year package. Or if you just happen to be 6'11" and weigh 270 pounds and break backboards when you dunk like Shaquille O'Neal, you are set for life. You see, it's not really the worth of a person that we applaud; it's how much we can get from him in terms of applause and how much we're willing to pay him.

Within the corporate world, we play the same games. We have visible symbols in the corporate world, like office furnishings and bonuses and salary. These all announce the worth of the person. As a person climbs, he or she will collect a sequence of important-sounding titles and he will be viewed as worthy. In the military, we have another way of doing it. It's called the chain of command. It defines a person's worth. One person salutes another person who is superior and commands others who are inferior, and stripes and uniforms alert everyone to our relative status and our worth.

You see, our culture is shot through with rating systems, and they begin as early as the first grade, don't they? We rate each other against each other. We make relative judgments on people's worth. It has to do with physical appearance and defined achievement. Some years back in the British Journal of Plastic Surgery, there was a disturbing article entitled "The Quasimodo Complex."

In the article, two physicians reported in their study that they had done an extensive survey of 11,000 prison inmates who had committed murder, rape, or other serious crimes. In their research, they discovered that in the normal adult population, 20% of all people have surgically correctable facial deformities, like protruding ears, misshapen noses, receding chins, acne scars, birthmarks, and other kinds of deformities that sometimes people go to plastic surgeons to have repaired.

But in the prison inmates, in those 11,000 prison inmates that they surveyed, 60% of those inmates had those kinds of deformities. And the authors of the article, who named the article "The Quasimodo Complex" after Quasimodo, who was Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, ended the article with some disquieting questions for all of us.

Had these criminals, they said, encountered hostility and rejection from classmates in grammar school and in high school because of their deformities, and could the cruelty of the other children have pushed them toward the state of emotional imbalance that ultimately led to their criminal acts? The article on the Quasimodo Complex reduces to statistics a truth that haunts every one of us at one time or another.

We human beings give inordinate regard to the physical body. It takes a rare person indeed to look past the shell and acknowledge the inherent value of a human being, no matter how that human being may be packaged. If you are here today and you've put all your hope for self-worth and self-esteem in the physical package, let me just be as honest with you as I can. No matter how good that package is, you are fighting a losing battle. You are going to lose.

You can't prop it up forever. You can't keep it moving forward all this time. You're going to hunch over one of these days and your hair's going to start falling out. I know it's depressing, but it's a truth. We all have to admit it. I remember Bill Gaither told me this one time. He said somebody gave him this little poem that says, "I can live with my arthritis and my dentures fit just fine. I can handle growing older, but I sure do miss my mind." I mean, that's kind of the way it is when you start moving along. So whatever you do, folks, don't put your value in the outer package.

Well, you say, "Pastor Jeremiah, if that's true, where do I get my sense of self-worth?" 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. 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 and everything else. We are created in the image of God. We respond to God, and that is because God has placed His imprint upon us. If that is true, we should not be surprised to discover that our worth as human beings has something to do with Him.

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. I want to say four things to you today. Number one, your self-esteem comes from the fact that God knows you. Think of the most important person in all of the world, the person everybody would just be in awe of. 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 afar 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 altogether. 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."

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 afar 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 ye 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'm not trying to make you feel guilty, but that's an awesome thought, isn't it? God knows everything that you say.

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'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 hast hedged me in from behind." He knows your future: "Thou hast 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. And God, when I go there, you are there. And it surprises some of you, I know, to think of God in Sheol. But 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 furthest west than Palestine. 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."

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 near us. 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.

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 Christmastime. He's called what? Immanuel, 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 aside and just dealt with this because what a wonderful truth it is. The Psalmist says, "O God, you have formed me and my inward parts and covered me in my mother's womb."

Saint Augustine once wrote, "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 omnipresence—He is everywhere.

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." 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. 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. And 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: 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 reins, 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 that's why Christian people struggle so much with the liberalized views of taking that human life indiscriminately and destroying it. God was involved at the very moment of conception.

There's a book written by Lewis Thomas called *The Medusa and the Snail*. It's about why people made such a fuss over test-tube babies in England. In this book, Thomas says the true miracle is the common union of the sperm and egg in a process that ultimately produces a human being. He said the mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments in all of the earth.

He said people ought to be walking around all day all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. He said if anyone ever does succeed in explaining it within my lifetime, I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them, and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another around the sky until all my money runs out. So incredible is that cell.

Over nine months, these cells divide up functions in exquisite ways. Billions of blood cells appear, millions of rods and cones, in all up to 100 million million cells from a single fertilized ovum. And finally a baby is born, glistening with liquid, already his cells cooperating, his muscles limber up in jerky, awkward moments and movements and his face recoils at the harsh light and the dry air of his new environment. His lungs and vocal cords join in a first air-gulping yell and within that clay-colored package of cells lies the miracle of human life. God was involved in the very beginning of it. God did it.

David Michael Jeremiah: We'll have more from Psalm 139 tomorrow on Turning Point. In the meantime, I hope you will meditate upon this Psalm and make this a motivation for you to get the book that we produced for this series, the resource book called *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. A 236-page hardback book that will help you practice daily abiding with the Lord, help you discover a deeper source of hope during difficult seasons, and encourage you to invest your time in relationships and activities that have eternal value.

It's only available from Turning Point and it's yours for a gift of any amount to Turning Point when you ask for this resource. We'll send it to you right away. So thankful that you joined us, and we're off to a good start for this week. I hope you'll be with us tomorrow as we continue our discussion of what is my self-worth.

For more information on Dr. Jeremiah's series, "God, I Need Some Answers," please visit our website, where we also offer two free ways to help you stay connected: our monthly magazine, Turning Points, and our daily email devotional. Sign up today at DavidJeremiah.org/radio. That's DavidJeremiah.org/radio. Or call us at 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, *Five Psalms for a Flourishing Life*. It'll help you abide with God, and it's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard, New International, and New King James Versions, available in your choice of attractive cover options. Get all the details when you visit our website, DavidJeremiah.org/radio. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue "God, I Need Some Answers" on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.