The Best News Ever: You’re the Worst Person in the WorldSample

It’s such a crazy thing that churched kids like myself do. We memorize the verses our parents, teachers, and church leaders highlight for us, and we ignore the rest of the Bible. Like Raechel Myers said in her podcast, She Reads Truth, we believe God’s Word is true, but our interaction with the Book doesn’t always reflect that.

Honestly, it wasn’t until I was in my thirties when I realized how much I’d been missing and misunderstanding by cherry-picking Bible verses. I spent long swaths of life coming to God’s Word via Google search, or, like, “Siri, find me a list of verses about contentment.”

And that’s great! I’m not against using technology to find helpful nuggets from the Lord, but it’s a really dangerous thing to do if you don’t actually read your Bible, too. It’s dangerous because if you don’t know the context and who was writing and who was listening and what you’re actually reading is saying, you are in danger of twisting the living and active and true Word of God to fit your agenda. When that happens, you miss the point.

We’ve all seen it on the news. People are holding up signs that are anti-this-particular sinner or anti-that. They often quote Bible verses about this or that being an abomination. Here’s the thing—God’s Word does call out behaviors and set parameters and tell us how to live in the way God has said works best. But, pulled out of context and used only to condemn someone, well, that’s the opposite of living out our faith.

Jesus didn’t come for a bunch of finger waggers. He came for the broken and the low—the people who have come to the ends of themselves and found that they need help.

Those aren’t insights out of my own brain. That’s what Jesus said with his human mouth when his human feet walked on this earth. God, in human skin, was here where we are — where things hurt and bleed and ache and die. He came here for us. It’s so crazy.

You can read example after example of Jesus loving and calling on the outcasts, the sinners, the prostitutes, the thieves, the murderers. Read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Loving and leading messed-up people is what He did. It’s what He still does today.

That’s really the whole thing. It’s the bottom line. Unless we recognize the reality that we are messed up people—hopeless, wicked, depraved, selfish beings who need outside help to be reconciled to God and restored to hope—unless we recognize that we (you, me, your best friend, and your worst enemy) are all a bunch of worst people in the world who really need a hero to save us from our depravity, we are believing lies and walking a path that will lead to our own destruction.