Unworthy

Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They

were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered

about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented--of whom the world was

not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. And all

these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having

provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.

Hebrews 11:36-40

The more I study and understand the Bible, the more obvious it becomes that I am not worthy of the love

and grace of God. In fact, grace is the giving of God’s unmerited favor; it’s not earned by a good life but is

God’s choice, bestowed freely and without constraint. Nevertheless, a curious passage in the book of

Hebrews does, for a change, say that there are people who have lived for God “of whom the world was

not worthy.” The word for worthy, “axios” in the Greek, refers to being a good fit, something or someone

that is deserved in relationship to what another has accomplished: you work a hard day’s work, here’s a

matching paycheck. The verse here tells us that these people who lived by faith, highlighted in Hebrews

11, were such that they did not fit the world they were in. The world hadn’t done enough to deserve their

presence. That’s a stark way of talking about justified sinners who lived by faith!

Another devotional I wrote recently spoke into the worthiness of the Gospel, and how a hard life lived for

Jesus can highlight the deep value of the beautiful message of the Gospel. Though scorned and treated

like undesirable garbage, Christians, through the passage of intense suffering, can be great highlighters

in the hand of God. These verses I have chosen today speak less to the faith and more to the grotesque

pain, but none of it would have come about had those people not held to their faith in spite of much

opposition.

Listen to me today: if you took the Mona Lisa and handed it to a class of second graders, it might come

back to you torn up, marked up, mangled, unrecognizable. You’d sit there shocked because it was so

incredibly valuable and they just went nuts as though it was their job to desecrate the thing. They didn’t

conceive of its worth and in fact, mocked the notion that it had any. Does their assessment make that

painting worth the level of their treatment of it? No, resoundingly, no!

When sinners get believers into their hands, and the Bible we hold, and the name of the Lord we love and

they just bash the tar out of all of it and denounce it and dismiss it and throw it to the curb, this does not

change the value. It just means that we took something valuable and let people who were not appropriate

to appraise it have their way. Don’t cast pearls before swine, right? Hopefully you’re not hearing me say,

“Don’t tell people about the Gospel,” because that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, when people

reject it and despise it and then turn on you, too, don’t let that inform you of the value God has given you,

or His word, or His glory, or the validity of the Good News. That is where the “the world was not worthy”

comes in.

I doubt any of us go to graveyards to get fashion advice for the day; don’t go asking spiritually dead

people whether Jesus is worth living for or whether God will keep His word to you. Sometimes you have

to keep your spiritual wits about you to hold up your bravery in the thick of all of this. Craziness is not

choosing to live for Jesus, but rather, taking something precious and proper and then looking for a lighter

to torch the thing. Park your focus higher and place it on Jesus. Let the beauty inform the bravery.

Sam Stringer

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.