Everybody wants to know that they matter. Everybody. And a lot of people feel they don’t matter. They feel like they don’t have any purpose. They don’t know what their purpose is. They don’t know what their value is. Why am I here? What’s this all about? And so if you happen to grow up in a dysfunctional atmosphere, that makes it even worse. I think. I think everybody searches for self worth. But your parents can help you a lot if they start early in your life telling you that you’re worth something and that you’re important and that you have value and that you can do great things. And if you got to grow up like that, you should thank god every day of your life that you did, because many of us did not get to grow up that way. I was one of them. And, um. So I had this little record playing in my head for most of the years of my life. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? And, of course, I thought something was wrong with me because my dad sexually abused me. I knew that that wasn’t right, that it wasn’t happening to everybody else. I knew. So I thought, what? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with me? It’s interesting that children will take the blame of something on themselves and an adult is doing to them. And you think, well, what’s wrong with me that you want to Do this. And it took me years and years and years, even years of being in God’s Word before that record finally stopped playing. And that came through God’s teaching about being made right with him through the blood of Christ. I think it’s interesting that one of the first things that god wants to give us is righteousness. Don’t you find that interesting? That he wants us to know that he loves us? And he loves us just because he wants to? Matter of fact, I heard something really interesting. I read it this past week. It says, why did god create us? Why. Why did he want us? Did he. Did he create us to worship him? Not really. He had angels to do that if that’s all he wanted. Did he create us to serve him? Well, see, god doesn’t really have a need. He doesn’t need anything. So he really didn’t create us just to serve him. Why did he create us? I think most people might say, well, to love him. But he really didn’t even need that, because god doesn’t need anything. He. God created us because he wanted somebody to love. Wow. I have to admit, I’ve never really seen it like that either. See, because love has to pour itself out. Love can’t be stagnant. It has to be moving. It has to be blessing someone. It has to be. It has to be active. And so god is love. It’s not Something he does, so he had to have somebody to love. So you’re created for love. So obviously if you feel you don’t have that, then you’re gonna always feel like there’s something wrong with you. I’ve had number of people say, when you pointed at me through that TV screen and said, god loves you, it changed my life. Because many people, even though we think everybody knows that, there are a lot of people that have never been told that in their whole life. You can even go to church for years and years and just be told what you should do and shouldn’t do and never really learn to get rooted and grounded deep. The Bible said Paul prayed that they would get rooted deep in the love of god. Not just a little, but rooted so deep that no matter what happens in your life, you can’t be pulled out of it. And we’re created in the image of god. So from the get go were assigned worth. I mean, there’s no other creature except us that’s created in the image of god. And one of the things that makes us created in the image of god is that we have free choice. And that’s a privilege, but it’s also a responsibility. And god gives us free choice because he doesn’t want people who have to serve him. He wants people that he can love, who will then respond to that love by wanting to serve. Him. And you know how we serve god? We can serve god because he doesn’t need anything. But what he wants us to do is he wants us to make ourselves available to him so he can work through us to love and help other people.