We Are Worthy
Jesus loves you, and he came to this earth to live the life that we could not, and he sacrificed himself on the cross to free us from our sins, so that we may no longer be separated from God. By Jesus blood, we have been made clean to draw near to God, where before we could not. Once you know this, and you fully believe it, your natural response should be joy and radical devotion to Jesus.
But why? So many people in this world son't understand what it means to truly follow Jesus, and it often starts with not understanding why we should follow him. But to understand why we should follow Jesus, we must first understand why we were made.
Picture for a moment an inventor. He is someone who's passion and talent in life is to build things, to make something out of nothing. An inventor takes pleasure in the act of planning and creating an invention, but his ultimate joy is in seeing an invention come to fruition, to see his work doing what he designed it to do. The inventor lives to see his invention come to life. But the inventor didn't create his invention just to make something, he created it with a purpose. He had an idea in his head of what he wanted to improve, and he went to work finding the solution to this problem.
Well let me tell you now that God is the inventor. In the beginning he created this world, but a world filled with plants and animals was not enough; God wanted someone to share in the beauty with. And so he created us, mankind, to be able to share in the beauty of this world, to enjoy all that he had made in a way that nothing else in this world could. God created us so that we could have a relationship with him, to be his family, his adopted sons and daughters, and for him to get joy in our doing what we were made to do. Because God created us to know him, God is overjoyed when we seek him. We are God's most prized creation.
But what happens when the invention starts to malfunction? Does the inventor look at it and say that it is hopeless, and abandon it and try to make something else? No, he finds the root of the problem and he fixes it. The problem is still there, and he has taken it upon himself to fix it at any cost. And sometimes the price to find and fix the problem is immense, but if the solution is as good as it is expected to be, no cost is ever too much.
When God created us, we were perfect, without sin, and we were able to live life directly with God, in his physical presence. But when Adam and Eve first sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God's perfect creation became broken. We were separated from God, and he had to punish sin. But God created us to know him, and the fact that we cut off from knowing him was a huge problem, one that he needed to remedy. This problem was great enough for him to go to any length to fix it, and that's exactly what he did. God himself came down to this earth in the form of the man Jesus Christ, his very son, and he lived the perfectly sinless life that no one else could. It was this life, and his death on the cross, that defeated the consequence of sin once and for all. God's punishment for sin was death, but when Jesus died with no sin to atone for, he rose from the grave, showing the world that sin is not his master. But even greater than that, Jesus' death made a way for us sinful humans to defeat death as well. His death bridged the gap between God and Man, and if we believe in this Gospel, we too will receive the gift of life that Jesus has made possible for us.
God is the inventor. We are his invention, created to know God and have a relationship with him, but we are broken by sin. God saw our sin and decided that he wanted to fix it. The reward of him fixing the problem of sin is that we could once again be united with God, and since this is why we were created, he wouldn't give up on us, because that does not solve the problem that he wanted someone to share this world with. And this reward is so great that God would do anything, and he did. He sent Jesus to this earth, to carry the weight of this world's sins on himself and take them to the grave. God saw us living life with him as worthy enough a reward that he sacrificed his own son so that we could know him.