You're Worth It

Lisa Harper opened with a story about a date with an NFL player. After weeks of phone calls, she drove from Nashville to Atlanta to meet him at a game. He played well, and afterward, instead of boarding the team bus, he told his coach he wanted to drive her back to Nashville—four hours through the night—and take a commercial flight home the next morning. When the coach objected, the player said, "She's worth the fine." He was willing to pay a monetary penalty and endure the teasing of teammates because he had decided she was worth it.

Harper used that story to frame her central argument: worth, when used as a predictive adjective—"you are worth the fine"—is entirely subjective. It depends on who is doing the proclaiming. The gospel, she said, is that God looks at us on our worst day and says the same thing.

Predetermined Worth

Harper grounded her argument in Psalm 139. David writes that God has searched him and knows him completely—every thought, every word, every movement. "Before a word is on my tongue, you, O Lord, know it completely." But the key line comes later: "Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."