"We are reaching a time in the West when mission in a non-Christian environment is again the primary mission of the Church, and that's a time when the gap between the Gospel and human judgments of worth will become evident again.
The Good News is once again liberating in this sense of redeeming people from the false assumptions that if they are not good enough by some empty reckoning of human success or some cultural token of worth, that they are literally worthless.
The Christian Good News is not embrace who you are, but be embraced by the unconditioned grace of God. But as we all know, saying it is one thing, living it is another….
We can all have the right words, but if the actions of our church say that racial difference, or social difference, really does matter, that Christianity doesn't really belong to people who are not like us, then we fail to communicate what grace is about.
It's a hard and costly thing to show people that they have worth in Christ and not just to tell them that. But the fact is that the amazing grace of God in Jesus Christ boils down all my assumptions about what is my own or other people's worth, in order to give me the only worth that counts in Jesus Christ.
To communicate that in a generation caught in the cross-fire of a cruelly judgmental world, and struggling from loss of self-esteem, would be to render the Good news good indeed."
Transcribed from a lecture by Professor John G Barclay pn 'Paul, Grace and the Contemporary Crisis of Self-worth.' Delivered in Australia, 2018.
Full lecture, which is well worth your time, can be found on Youtube here
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