This morning I showed up to Element and there was a piece of paper taped to the main entrance door. You have to understand that this happens every once in a while. Sometimes it is other churches asking us things, sometimes it is crazy Christian gibberish about the wrath of God being poured out (complete with verses taken out of context), and sometimes, like this time, it is a question that seems genuine. I opened up the piece of paper and this is what it said in its entirety: “Is life even worth living?” Here it is in case you want to see it:
Because I have deep-rooted issues of my own, my mind immediately starts racing with a couple of questions. “Are they asking me, are they asking the church as whole, or are they asking God?” I wonder if there is a reason they didn’t stick around for an answer. I wonder if it was a homeless person, but then wonder where they would get paper, pencil, and tape. Like I said, I have my issues. My first and natural inclination is to want to answer the question, but because no one stuck around to hear the answer, I was just left frustrated. So…I wrote this blog about it instead.
Let’s ask the question (by the way, this is typically not how I would answer this person face to face…I would be much less logical and try to speak to their emotions), “Is life worth living?”. The word “worth” means to have a value, and as an adjective, it means “important enough to justify.” Is someone’s life important enough to justify? According to the Scriptures, the answer is a resounding “yes.” We are told that God made mankind in His image and that is what gives us our “worth”; we have worth simply because God says we do. Matt 6:25-26 “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” That worth that we are assigned means that life is worth living.
I started to wonder what would make me question the worthiness of life, and I decided that if my wife died, I might ask that question. I would have what I imagine to be unbearable pain, heartache, and sadness; my life would be placed into turmoil because of what happened to me. Then I started to think that there would lie my issue: I had made my life all about myself. If I asked, “Is life even worth living?” it would be because I had centered my world upon myself and my own circumstances. Don’t get me wrong here, I understand it is much easier to say this and think this way when my world hasn’t collapsed around me…but it makes it no less true. The more we make our lives and our happiness dependent upon ourselves and our circumstances, the more we will be at the whim of circumstances beyond our perceived control (which is truly every circumstance in life). When our lives become about us, they will all eventually become not worth living, because in reality, we can’t control anything.
Ephesians 2:4-9 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God…Worth can be defined by how much someone is willing to pay for something. The God of the universe gave the life of His son to pay the penalty for our sin and redeem us from a lost way of life. This redemption is not based up on our merit, but upon God’s goodness, upon the value He has given to us. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” These are words of worth and value.
If we are a people who live our lives for ourselves, focused on ourselves and our desires, we will always end up in a place of regret. However, if we live our lives centered on Jesus and the good news of His hope and redemption, while we may still find ourselves in times of sadness, we will have a life that is full and free.
“Is life even worth living?”
I think the answer to that question depends on who we are living for—ourselves or Jesus. I think it depends on whether we allow our circumstances to define us or Jesus to define us, because Jesus defines us as worthy, which makes life worth living because our lives are about Him.
