Derek Prince - Never Speak Bad About Yourself
This is an excerpt from: Do You Realize How Valuable You Are?
There’s a passage in 1 Corinthians 15, which is very exciting to me. 1 Corinthians 15 Verse 45 and following. And so it is written, The first man, the first Adam and you know Adam in Hebrew is directly connected with the word for earth which is adama. So his name indicated he was taken from the earth. The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam, that’s Jesus became a life-giving spirit. The first man was of the earth, earthly. The second man is the Lord from heaven.
So Jesus has two titles and it’s very important to get them in the right order. First of all he was the last Adam. He was the end of the whole Adamic inheritance. All the sin and rebellion and the evil was cut off at His death. When He died, it died. When He was buried, it was buried. And when He rose again, He rose as the second man. A new kind of man. A new race. The Emmanuel race. The God man race. The race in which God and man are united in one nature. And that is what we are born into through faith.
If we believe in His atoning death and His triumphant resurrection we become part of the second man. A new kind of being that had never existed before in which God and man are united in one person. That’s the destiny of us as Christians. It says in 1 Timothy 2:5, For there is one Mediator between man and God, the Man Christ Jesus. That was many years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. So there is a Man on the throne of God. The Man Christ Jesus. That’s a breathtaking thought if we can absorb it for just a little while. There is a representative of our race at the highest place in the universe, a Man, Christ Jesus on the throne of God. You see God takes the lowest and raises it to the highest. He started with dust, but His destiny is to end on the throne of God. From the lowest to the highest.
Now I want to take two parables. Matthew chapter 13. Have you ever pondered on this chapter? It’s the chapter of the seven parables. It’s a rich and exciting chapter. But I want to take two of the shortest. One is one verse and the other is two verses. In verse 44, my Bible heads this The Parable of the Hidden Treasure. Jesus is speaking. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
If you think yourself into the history of the Middle East, how did that treasure get hidden in the field? Well, probably there was an invading army that came at some time. And a man was afraid of losing his possessions. So he quickly went to a field and buried his treasure in the field. But who knows what happened. War swept that way. He never got back. And so the treasure lay buried in the field. And then another man comes along and he discovers the treasure and he’s very, I would say, crafty. He doesn’t tell everybody about it. He hides it. He covers it up. And he goes and buys the field as though it was just an ordinary field. Maybe he pays a little excessive price.
People marvel. Why would he buy that field? There’s nothing in that field. It’s not worth what he paid for it. But once he owned the field he digs up the treasure And then people understand why he bought the field. And I want to say that man is Jesus. I know there are different ways of interpreting parables, but I want to interpret it this way. That man is Jesus. The field the parables tell us is the world. Jesus died for the whole world. He paid the price for the whole world, but it isn’t the world He wants. It’s the treasure in the field.
What is the treasure? God’s people. So He was willing to pay the price for an apparently worthless field in order to get the treasure which is you and me. That’s how much He cares for you and me. That’s how much He thinks of us. That’s how much we mean to Him. We are not unimportant, we are not insignificant, we’re not worthless. We’re extremely valuable. So valuable that Jesus gave His life to purchase us.
Never again from tonight onwards talk about yourself as if you were insignificant or unimportant or worthless. Just discard all that thinking. It’s not Scriptural. I’m not telling you to be proud, but I’m telling you to realize your true value. Because you gain nothing by this attitude of poor me, I don’t amount to much. I’m just a little something or other. That’s not pleasing to God. You’re a son or a daughter of God.
God has no second class children. You are important. You are very, very valuable. You’re special. Begin to understand that here tonight. Drop that cringing attitude. Drop that sense of worthlessness. You don’t have to apologize for being you. It’s you that God wanted. He wanted you the way you are. But He won’t leave you that way. You’re not glorifying God by being so humble, because it’s not humility. Its unbelief. You are a child of God tonight if you’ve received Jesus by faith. You’re part of the treasure.
I think the ministry of the gospel is digging the treasure out. Jesus bought the field He leaves it to us to dig the treasure out. And when treasure has been under the earth for a long while it’s often corrupted and tarnished and that’s part of the ministry too, is to polish it up and clean it up. I think that’s the ministry that God has given me to polish up the treasure that has been so long under the ground. God has given me a sense of the value of God’s people.