In my sermon, I emphasized the need for Christians to find their worth and value in Christ alone. I discussed how often we seek worth in material gain and achievements, but these things ultimately leave us empty and unfulfilled. True worth and purpose can only be found in Christ, who offers us forgiveness, redemption, and a relationship with God. I encouraged the congregation to prioritize God in their lives and to align their values with His, recognizing that He is the source of true worth and contentment.

Key takeaways:
- Find your worth and value in Christ alone, not in material gain or achievements (Philippians 1:20-21, Philippians 3:3-11)
- Recognize that seeking worth in the things of this world will ultimately leave you empty and unfulfilled (Hebrews 13:5, Matthew 6:24, 1 Timothy 6:9)
- Prioritize God in your life and align your values with His, allowing Him to be the source of your worth and contentment (Proverbs 3:5-6, Ecclesiastes 2:20-23)

**Good morning!**

My name is Jake, and I'm one of the worship leaders here at Praise. I'm grateful to have the opportunity to give the sermon this morning.

Before we get started, we're going to take offering. Ushers are going to come down and pass the buckets. The tithe is an aspect of our worship as Christians. It's how we further put our trust in the Lord, not only with our lives and our sin, but also with our finances. Whenever you give your offering today, remember that it's not just a financial transaction; it's an act of worship. I'm excited to see what God does with that.

I'm so excited to see you guys here this weekend. My name is Paige, and I'm happy that you've joined us at Praise. I love to share a scripture before we get started. It's Psalm 34, and it says, "I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise will continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; Let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together."

If that's your story this morning, if He delivered you from all, then we have a reason to worship. God is worthy of our praise, and we're going to exalt Him together this morning. So come on, let's sing together.

Jesus, thank you for your faithfulness. Be the shepherd boy, be crazy courageous. Already today, please pray for me. I throw away faith for the impossible. How did I start to believe you weren't sufficient for me? Why do I talk myself out of what the Lord can do?

So Father, we seek you this morning. We declare and believe that you are more than able to see us through problems in life, health struggles, and sin struggles. Because of your son Jesus, who has done the heavy lifting, we can be confident in trusting you with every aspect of our life.

So Lord, give us faith this morning. Build our faith to believe and trust you, the one who still does miracles, the God who was, is, and is to come. We can have joy, peace, and hope in that fact. We worship you today, Father, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Whenever we make God the Father our Creator, Christ our Savior, and the Holy Spirit our Guide and Helper the focus point of our lives and make Him the prize of our life, true worship takes place. Worship is ascribing God the glory, value, and worth that He is due. We can find our worth not in the things of this world, but in Christ Alone.

At Praise Church, all of our collective funds go towards supporting and holding up the ministry that happens there. Whenever you give, you are supporting the Children's Ministry, Youth, Young Adults, Small Groups, Worship Team, and Mission Work. This past week, our High School Students went to Arlington and were a part of a mission called Mission Arlington. They served, got sweaty, helped people, and shared the Gospel. Whenever you contribute and trust God with your finances, you will be blessed.

The American English term 'worship' is actually a derivative term from a European English term called 'worthship'. Worship can be diluted to a music genre, but it is so much more than that. It is about finding our worth in Christ Alone.

Thank you for giving this morning. Let us remember to make God the focus point of our lives and make Him the prize of our life. That is when true worship takes place. I'm the top of the hierarchy of our value system and our hearts. That's when we find true worth, purpose, contentment, and joy.

So, I've got some scriptures that I'd like to dive into this morning to give us some context and weight to this thought. We're going to start in Philippians 1:20-21. Paul is basically attributing what he just said to, as long as I'm alive, Christ is the only thing that really matters, and if I were to die, I'd be better off than seeking after the things of this world. To live is Christ and to die is gain.

We then move to Philippians 3:3-11. Paul is listing off his achievements, but whatever gains he has, he now considers loss for the sake of Christ. He considers everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus. He wants to gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of his own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ.

The righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith is not a righteousness that you could obtain; it's a righteousness that is freely given with grace and mercy. He wants to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and participate in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.

If you call yourself a Christian, it is insanely important to attain to the resurrection from the dead. We often spend much of our life chasing after whatever our flesh desires, but if we truly have Christ in our life, it is a waste of time and effort. We should not swing the pendulum all the way to the other side, as this is never right.

We should seek after the kingdom of righteousness and seek God's kingdom first, and God will add what we need. We should make sure that material gain is not higher than God in our values and not above Him in the hierarchy of what we consider worthy in life.

Hebrews 13:5 says to keep our lives free from the love of money and be content with what we have, as God has promised never to leave us or forsake us. Matthew 6:24 says no one can serve two masters; either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. We cannot serve both God and money.

It is a matter of treasure and worth in our hearts, and we won't need excess if our treasure is already in God's presence. We should be content with what God has given us already, as He is with us.

God's love for us is evident in His knocking at the door, but it is up to us to open it and invite Him into our lives. Transformation takes place when we do this, but it requires spiritual disciplines and making God the highest worth in our lives.

First Timothy 6:9 warns us that those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. This is a good analogy to the concept of playing baseball. When catching the ball, we must keep our eye on the ball, or else we will get hurt.

Metaphorically, when we take our eye off the beauty and treasure of Jesus, the consequence is sin and idolatry, which is painful and embarrassing. Material gain and love of money are two things that can take our eye off the ball. Our achievements can also be a trap, as our identity can become wrapped up in being the best at something.

To help navigate life, Tim Keller and his wife Kathy have written a 365-day devotional about God's wisdom. It takes readers through the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and is a great way to stay focused on God. Putting out at the top of your value system, finding something that you can daily put yourself into a system and a rhythm of valuing God every day is important.

The title of this devotion day is called the Vanity of Achievement. Solomon says, "So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun, for a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge, and skill, and then they must leave all that they own to another person who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune."

Work and achievement fail on their own terms. Worth does not actually, in the end, really achieve quickly or slowly, and the results of our toil are wiped away by history. Work and achievement fail a subjective test; they never fully satisfy. Work begins or work brings grief and pain, and you are up early and late to bed, often unable to sleep even at night and filled with the feeling that the work is not really all that well done.

Proverbs points to the satisfaction work can bring, but Ecclesiastes reminds us that we often feel the thorns, thistles, and grinding frustration that is the curse on work in a fallen world. Work and achievement without the peace of God in our lives through the spirit will never be enough. We need the God whose labor led to real rest and the Savior who could even sleep through a storm.

Have you ever achieved a goal only to find it unfulfilling? Have you found goals that outlast time? What are the goals in your life that you can actually take with you? Money and skills won't come with you, so it's important to find something that will.

This concept of vanity of achievement is explored in the story of The Prodigal Son. Often, Christians are the older brother who play Church and manipulatively do all the things because they want the blessing, but not God's presence in their life.

Dr. Aleister Begg, a theologian, talks about the thief on the cross. In the gospel, the two thieves start off by berating Jesus and questioning his authority and divinity. But then something shifts, and one of the thieves becomes repentant and apologetic. Jesus tells him he will be with him in his kingdom, and this forgiveness is a divinely authoritative salvific claim. The thief didn't deserve anything, but Jesus still forgave him.

This video encourages us to not let material gain be our ultimate goal, as it won't last.

Oh Society, I'm not saying any of that. What I'm saying is coming to alignment and balance of why you do what you do. If you swing the pendulum the other way, you're just going to be lazy, and you're not going to contribute at all. But if you're this way, pride will set in, and your reasons for why you do what you do are corrupted and internalized and selfish. At the end of it, you'll find nothing.

It's like that, it's that Tom Brady effect, right? If you've seen any of his interviews, at the time he did it, I think he only had like four or five rings; now he's got, I don't care, but you get the point. He's talking about how he has reached the pinnacle of the National Football League, which, if you think about it, is probably the majority of boys' dreams. You know, this is achievement at its highest for a lot of people.

In this interview, he just straight up says, for whatever reason, he's not satisfied; he's not content. And I think that's wisdom pouring out of somebody who's really exhausted their time and effort to obtain something in this world, and the hole's still there, the discontentment's still there, and Christ has been there the whole time.

You look at everything else, and he's right here, and he's saying, "Here I am, when are you going to choose me?" Because at the end, I'm all you're going to have.

So God is the provider of all things: your worth, your skill, your strength, your status, your money, your joy, your contentment, your purpose. Seeing and recognizing and admitting and especially declaring that fact, because now you're influencing others to follow suit as well.

That's the act of giving God supreme worth, which is trumping what I'm really trying to say. When you do that, you are worshiping God, and that's where the outpour of singing takes place. It's a value system that comes deep inside your heart that drives your work ethic, it drives your desires and your contentment. It also drives your longing to connect with him, and singing is something that God created, and music is something that God created in order to magnify that to another level.

We all know the effect that beautiful music has, right? It's a divine thing.

So I'll land the plane with this: we're going to sing a song. It's a hymn; it's one of my favorites, and it ties in fairly well with what I'm talking about this morning. The song is called "My Worth is Not in What I Own," and I want to read a few of the verses for you because they're profound, and I want you to get it.

The first verse says, "My worth is not in what I own, not in the strength of flesh and bone, but in the costly wounds of love at the cross."

The chorus says, "I rejoice in my Redeemer, greatest treasure, the wellspring of my soul. And I will trust in Him no other, for my soul is satisfied in Him alone."

And when the last verse says, "These are two wonders here I confess, my worth and my unworthiness."

My worth is found in Christ alone, not in the things of this world. My ransom is paid at the cross, and my unworthiness is fixed.

Let us pray and sing to the Lord, declaring His truth, power, and benevolence. Let us honor Him with glory, honor, and praise, in submission, obedience, and joyful singing.

We love You, Lord, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Let us rejoice in our Redeemer, for He has been so good to us. Every breath we take is an act of His goodness. Let us tell the story of God's goodness and give Him praise.

Last week, we talked about Paul's resume and how he wanted to know Christ in the power of His resurrection and share in His sufferings. He wanted to become like Him in His death, so that he may attain the resurrection of death.

Paul said he did not consider what he had attained as his own, but he pressed on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. We must learn to forget what lies behind and strain forward to what lies ahead.

Let us press on towards the goal and pursue what God has for us the rest of our lives. Some of our students go to Mission Arlington, and I want you to see some of these photos. This is them serving in the apartment complexes, bringing out food and sharing the gospel, hanging out with kids.

It's an incredible thing that we get to send our high schoolers to go share their faith and live out their faith. This was our fourth trip for our Next Gen, but in a month, we have a conference for PYA (Praise Young Adults, 18-20ish upwards). There's a tent in the lobby for PYA, and you can go online and sign up at praisechource.tv.

The conference is about bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to this earth, meaning how do we bring the Kingdom of God to Exxon Lamar, our work, wherever we play. How can we bring the Kingdom of God? Chris Durso, a pastor from New York City, and Rebecca Lyons, an author and speaker, will be attending the conference.

Before we send you out, I want to bless you. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May you make His face shine down upon you, turn His countenance towards you and your family, and may He grant you His peace, His Shalom, that will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus.

I bless you in the name that is higher and superior to any other name, that is the name of Jesus.

Everybody said amen. Thanks for being at Praise today. God bless you.