Humans have no inherent or implicit value

The Lord taught that we should assume that we are worse than we think until proven otherwise:

8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.
11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 14)

The world preaches a very different message.

Modern society has been steeped in the belief that all people are equally valuable in spite of any differences between them. For example, Oprah-famous author Brene Brown wrote:

To be authentic, we must cultivate the courage to be imperfect—and vulnerable. We have to believe that we are fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance, just as we are.[^100]

A human has unlimited potential value, but no inherent or implicit value. Our worth is limited to how much like God we have become, and that change only happens by defying our human nature.¹ No one is “fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance.” A person is not automatically valuable. On the contrary, the value of fallen humans lies only in their potential to become something better. The worth of a soul is its potential to become more like God. Without intentional improvement, a human will assuredly do more harm than good.

Worthy describes one who has paid the price of something. Worthiness can’t be determined by the edict of non-participants, but only by the parties who actually pay for the thing they appraise. Imagine how foolish it would be for a third party to proclaim the price of some possession in the absence of anyone willing to buy it for that price—and yet our society does this across many applications every single day: from enforcing a minimum wage to declaring that everyone is beautiful.

At the root of the lie of intrinsic value is a desire for all things to be equal—something that can only be achieved by bringing down the value of all things to the lowest common denominator. Value is an inescapable question of hierarchical preference: a thing’s value is always measured by the other things people will sacrifice in exchange for it. If all things are equally valuable, nothing is valuable. When it comes to people, a person who has a positive quality must be more valuable than one without it, or else the positive quality has no value. You can’t believe that people have intrinsic value without diminishing their potential virtue.