Chapel speech: On self-worth.

Originally presented at Luther Junior and Senior High School morning chapel, November 11, 2013.

High school graduation, 2007.

My high school seemed like it only wanted its graduates to go to college and nowhere else. The message was repeated over and over. Motivational speakers came to school and told us why we should go to college. Daily we were given information about different colleges all around the state and country. Students' families paid large amounts of money to companies and tutors that claimed to help students get high scores on the SAT, the test that almost all U.S. colleges require.

I felt the pressure, too. As the last year of high school drew closer, I worried more and more about getting into college. What if I didn't get in to a good college? What if all the colleges I applied to rejected me? What if I chose the wrong college for me? My second-to-last year of high school I took classes and joined clubs I wasn't even interested in, just to make my college applications look better. I had to go to college. College was the only way to make yourself worth anything to anyone. That's what the books and the websites and the teachers and the counselors told me, anyway.

I spent the last two years of high school trying to make myself into someone worth being accepted into college, and at the same time, my own sense of worth fell through the floor. I wasn't enjoying my advanced classes; in fact, I was getting the lowest grades of my life and had almost no motivation to try to improve them (except for college applications, of course). I hated doing college applications because I'd have to write essays about how great a student I was while I felt like the most inept human on Earth.

When we try to make our own worth, or when we make our worth dependent on someone else's approval, we will always come up lacking. That's what happened to me when I focused so hard on my college applications. I was so worried about whether a certain college would accept me that I nearly forgot about my Creator's acceptance of me that has always stood.

In the psalm you just heard, the author praises God for having known him from the beginning. God knows all of us more deeply than we know ourselves. He planned your existence, and mine. He thought creating you and me would be a good idea long before we were born. We don't have to prove our worth to God. We don't have to write essays or pass examinations. How could we? God is greater than any of us.

The truth is: we're not even worthy of God's love. We can never earn it, not by obeying all Ten Commandments or by spending all our time volunteering. God is perfect and demands perfection. We're not capable of perfection. How many times have you said something unkind, or ignored someone, or did something you knew you shouldn't?

But this is the depth of God's love for us: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." That's from the book of Romans in Bible (Romans 5:8b). Jesus Christ, who is God, took the shame of our imperfection and sin on the Cross so we could be saved and become part of God's family. That is a crazy deep love, from Someone who demands perfection.

So if you feel worthless to your family, your teachers, your peers, a college, or even society, please remember: you're worth everything to God. God knew you and loved you before anyone else did.

Let us pray.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for your love. Help us to remember this love and share it with others.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
Psalm 139:13-16 (NIV)