Thought of the Day 08.04.09

It’s very interesting to notice what it takes to impress most people, and the thing it usually requires is to measure up on some scale they have adopted; a scale which winds up favoring them and their attributes.

For instance, a beauty queen will tend to find you valuable if you are beautiful. A professor will tend to find you valuable if you are smart. And a virtuous man will tend to find you valuable if you are good.

But compare this with the approach of our Savior. He is more beautiful than any beauty queen, smarter than any professor, and more virtuous than we dare imagine. Thus, if we were to try to measure up according to His example, we would be abject failures.

And yet He begins our relationship by telling us that we have supreme value for an entirely different reason: because He says so and confirmed the appraisal by what He sacrificed in order to get us. The most difficult and most exhilarating aspect in Christianity is simply this: to have value for no other reason than that He says we have it.