New Salem Baptist Church

Your Immense Value

Jan. 12, 2025

16        We have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:16; LSB)

This is a verse that possesses great power to lift our spirit and open our eyes to the love of God.

See that the apostle John writes that God’s love is in us! Some versions have that God has love for us. It does carry that meaning, too. But the word for is not in the original language. The apostle John writes “in”!

We do know that God loves those who belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. That is, he loves those who follow Jesus, those who have given their lives to him. If you have not yet given your life over to the Lord Jesus, if you do not yet love Him, then you have no guarantee that God loves you. There is a sense where God loves all that he has made. But this is not the love that the apostle John writes of in his letters. The apostle means a special and deep love that God has only for those who love his Son.

That God loves us is testified many, many times throughout the Bible.[1] This means that he loves you. But by using the word, in, the apostle means to communicate more than this.

Let us consider first the fact that God loves you:

⁴ But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, ⁵ even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— (Eph 2:4; ESV)

God loved you before you were made alive in Christ. When you were dead in your sins, he was loving you. And, because he loved you, he brought you to Christ. Think about this. If he loved you when you were a rebel, he does not love you any less now that you follow Jesus, even if your obedience is defective and inconsistent. We saw this truth in chapter ten of Hebrews. Let me refresh your memory:

¹⁴ For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. (Heb. 10:14; ESV)

If we belong to Christ then we are perfected in every way, even though we are still being sanctified. That is, even though we still stumble into sin and the Lord is in the process of transforming us, we are perfected in his sight because of Christ’s sacrifice. This means the Lord is loving us now just as much, if not more than, before we came to Christ!

The fact that God loves you means that your value is beyond expression. Your value is immense.

We were not God’s first creation. God created angels before he created Adam and Eve (Job 38:7). In fact, he created the angels with greater power and glory than he did mankind. Those with even a cursory familiarity with the Bible know what happened. But, let us review this pre-creation history because it has to do with your immense value.

You see, God created the angels with great power and glory, some more than others. Those who had more were called archangels. Lucifer was one of these. In Ezekiel 28, the first ten verses address the prince of Tyre. Then, starting at verse 11, the passage addresses the king of Tyre. This is a euphemism for the devil:

¹¹ Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me: ¹² “Son of man, raise a lamentation over the king of Tyre, and say to him, Thus says the Lord God:

                    “You were the signet of perfection,

full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.

        ¹³          You were in Eden, the garden of God;

every precious stone was your covering,

                    sardius, topaz, and diamond,

beryl, onyx, and jasper,

                    sapphire, emerald, and carbuncle;

and crafted in gold were your settings

and your engravings.

                    On the day that you were created

they were prepared.

        ¹⁴          You were an anointed guardian cherub.

I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God;

in the midst of the stones of fire you walked.

        ¹⁵          You were blameless in your ways

from the day you were created,

till unrighteousness was found in you. (Ezekiel 28:11-15; ESV)

And:

¹⁷      Your heart was proud because of your beauty;

                    You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of

splendor. (Ezekiel 28:17a; ESV)

Although Lucifer was created with magnificent beauty and ability, his heart became filled with pride. He is now the enemy of God and the enemy of mankind.

God then created man in very humble circumstances. He made him from the dust of the earth (Gen. 2:7). He did this as if to remind him from whence he came…just dust! Because of our origin, there is no cause for us to have pride. Yet, we are afflicted with pride nonetheless.

Pride is a great sin. Even in its subtle forms it is destructive. It is often pride that prevents us from being reconciled with a brother or sister in the flesh, a brother or sister in the Lord, and our husband or wife. In order to be saved from pride we only need to put others above ourselves. This is easy to say but sometimes hard to do. Yet, this is the apostle’s solution:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others as more significant than yourselves. (Phil.2:3)

This should be our frame of thought with all, but especially with our family members, our fellow disciples and, most of all, our husband or wife. Do you have a desire to bend your will to those whom you love? This is the key to overcoming pride. Not only does it overcome pride but it engenders peace of mind and a joyful contentment.

So, God created us in a humble way yet he has poured out his tender love upon us! God made this promise to David:

I will not withdraw my faithful love from him or betray my faithfulness. (Psalm 89:33; CSB)

We saw a short time ago, from Hebrews chapter 13, that the Psalms are not reserved as expressions of love and favor to David alone. Rather, they are for those who are also part of the new covenant. They are for us. God will not withdraw his love nor his faithfulness from David, but neither will he withdraw his love and faithfulness from you!

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. (1 John 3:1; ESV)

Here we see that it is not every person who experiences this love from God. It is those who have become his children. But, becoming his children proves that God loves us!

He loved his covenant people under the former covenant:

The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save;

he will rejoice over you with gladness;

he will quiet you by his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zeph 3:17; ESV)

Surely, if he loved the wayward Israelites so greatly, he loves you at the present moment!

You must see your immense value because God, the most magnificent one, has placed his love upon you!

The Bible never says that God loves the angels. His highest love is reserved for those who love Jesus.

He proves his love to us foremost by sacrificing His Son on our behalf. But he also proves his love for us by putting his own love within us! This is what we saw in 1 John 4:16. Look at it again:

16        We have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:16; LSB)

This love that the God has placed within us is nothing less than God Himself since he is love!

He is a treasure with us.

Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us. (2 Cor. 4:7; CSB)

We are the jars of clay and the Triune God is the treasure in us. Thus, we do not have to muster up love on our own. This would be difficult if not impossible. There are some people that are hard to love. Even those we do love in a deep way will do things or say that interrupt our peace and disturb our heart. When this happens we love them anyway. But we do not have to work it up. There is an extraordinary power within us which is God’s love!

He loves us when we fail him and we love our sister or our husband or our wife when they fail us!

[Conclusion and Application]

We saw three things today:

• You are of supreme value to God. Even though we came from humble circumstances, being made from dust, God chose you from before the foundation of the world to belong to him.
• God loves you. This, in itself,  is amazing and ought to lift our spirits!
• God has instilled his love within you. You do not have to muster up love. Its already within you. We have only to turn to our human spirit where the Spirit of the Living God has come to dwell!

So, what ought we to do?

• Knowing our value overcomes negative thinking. Always trust in what God has revealed about his goodness and value towards you!
• Know, with certainty, that God loves you.
• Because God’s love is in you, then we must love those closest to us in the same way that God loves us. This means that we must be fully reconciled to our brothers and sisters in the Lord, our brothers and sisters by blood, and to our husbands and wives.

This third point, being reconciled, is a manifestation of God’s love within you. Is God’s love within you? Then, take the first step in reconciliation. Often, when two people are not in harmony, each one thinks the other is the more at fault. The truth is that, in almost all cases, both persons could have spoken more kindly or dome things more gently.

This means that each person in a disrupted relationship has the opportunity to make amends by apologizing for whatever lack they had. This often encourages the other person to apologize, too.

This week, show the love of God in you by putting someone first. It’s a wonderful thing that will bring peace and contentment into your life in greater measure.

“Lord, help us to be at peace with every person we love. And help us to love with the Love that you have for us. Amen.”