Better Than You Think

This article is an excerpt from Chris Morphew’s new book, “Worth It: Following Jesus When Life Feels Complicated” by The Good Book Company (2025) and is shared with permission.

Starting at the beginning

The Bible is clear that we’ve all run out on the God who made us, that we’re all in desperate need of his rescue, and that our fractured relationship with God is such a huge deal that the only way to put things right was for Jesus to give up his life in our place.

Those things are true, but they’re not where the story begins.

The story doesn’t start with sin; it starts with love—with God hand-crafting humanity in his own image to spend the rest of forever sharing in his perfect love and partnering with him to rule and govern his good creation. (Genesis 1:26-28)

And this is absolutely critical.

If we skip past all this and start the story with sin, we give the impression that our fundamental identity is “you are terrible”—which is not at all what the Bible teaches.

When Jesus was confronted by a bunch of self-righteous religious people, demanding to know why he was spending so much time with “tax collectors and sinners”—with people they just assumed were too fundamentally terrible for God to want anything to do with—Jesus explained, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick”. (Mark 2:15-17)

Jesus describes sin as sickness.

And what I want you to notice here is that identifying someone as sick is not a statement about their fundamental identity; it’s a statement about how they are, not who they are.

A person with cancer is not fundamentally a “cancer patient”. Their cancer is not their deepest, truest self; it’s a malfunctioning of their deepest, truest self—a corruption of normal cellular activity. It’s extremely serious. It needs to be dealt with or it’s going to kill them. But their cancer is not, at the deepest level, who they are. Who they are is a person in dire need of a doctor to restore them to the fullness of life they were created for.

And the same, Jesus says, is true of us, in all the mess of our sin:

We are desperately sick and in need of a doctor.

We are hopelessly lost and in need of a rescuer. (Luke 19:10)

We are chained up in prison and in need of liberation. (Luke 4:16-19)

We are dead and in need of resurrection. (John 5:24)

Our situation could not be more serious—but these are all statements about how we are, not who we are.

Your fundamental identity is not sinner.

Your fundamental identity is made in the image of God.

Listen to ep.97 of the Youth Pastor Theologian Podcast to hear Mike talk with Chris Morphew about his book, Worth It

The reason the breakdown of our relationship with God is so unfathomably tragic is that it’s the fracturing of something so unfathomably great.

If I draw a little stick figure on a scrap of paper and then throw that paper in the bin, I doubt anyone is going to shed any tears. But if I set fire to the Mona Lisa or put a wrecking ball through Michelangelo’s David, it’s a different story, because those things are priceless masterpieces.

Which, according to the Bible, is also what you are. (Psalm 8:5-6; 139:13-14)

And human beings aren’t just God’s greatest sculptures. We’re God’s sculptures of himself—reflections of his character—installed here on earth so that anyone who looks at us can say, “Oh, so that’s what God is like”.

The reason your sin and rebellion are so disastrous is because you’re defacing the priceless artwork you were truly created to be, and defaming the artist who gave you that identity and purpose in the first place.

Getting the beginning of the story right doesn’t make our sin and rebellion any less serious; if anything, it shines an even brighter spotlight on the betrayal and tragedy of it all.

But what it also does is set us up to make better sense of the whole rest of the story: Jesus’ purpose in dying for you wasn’t to make a way for God to love you even though what he actually thinks of you is that you’re horrible and disgusting; Jesus died because God already loved you. (John 3:16)

And God’s great plan for the future isn’t just to save you from hell or get you into heaven; it’s to restore everything that’s been lost and broken as we’ve turned away from him, and to welcome us back into the fullness of life we were always made for. (Colossians 1:19-20; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:5)

Which brings us to the other part of the story that so often gets left out.

The true end of the story

If you ask most followers of Jesus what they think is going to happen to them when they die, they’ll tell you that they’re going to go to heaven to be with Jesus.

Which, sure, is part of what the Bible teaches. When Jesus’ friend Paul talked about death, he described it as leaving this life and going to be with Jesus, (Philippians 1:23) and when Jesus was on the cross, he told one of the criminals dying next to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise”. (Luke 23:43)

So yes, anyone who puts their trust in Jesus can look forward to being with him in heaven after they die—but that’s not our final destination.

The great story of God and humanity is the story of how Jesus is on a rescue mission to renew and restore and redeem this world. This place—the physical universe you’re living in, here and now—is where the action is, and it’s where it always will be.

We don’t need to go anywhere else to be with Jesus, because he’s coming to us. (Revelation 21:2-3)

Right now, Jesus is patiently waiting to give each one of us all the opportunity we need to turn back to him and let him rescue us; after all, he doesn’t want anyone to perish, but everyone to come back home to him. (Ezekiel 19:23; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9)

But one day, Jesus will return. And when he does, “the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live”. (John 5:25)

When Jesus returns, every single dead person who has ever put their trust in him will come back to life, just like Jesus did (1 Corinthians 15:22-23; 1 Thessalonians 4:16)—not as ghosts or angels or whatever, but as real flesh-and-blood humans (Luke 24:36-43) with real human bodies that can no longer get sick or die, because thanks to Jesus, the power of death no longer has any authority over us. (Romans 6:9; 1 Corinthians 15:42-44) “Then the saying that is written [in the Old Testament] will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’” (1 Corinthians 15:54)

Those of us who are still alive when Jesus returns will just keep on living. We’ll be transformed into our new, imperishable bodies without ever having to die, (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) and we’ll join with everyone else in joyfully welcoming our great King Jesus back to earth. (1 Thessalonians 4:17)

And when he returns, Jesus will renew all things, (Matthew 19:28; Revelation 21:5) setting the world free from all the damage we’ve done to it, (Romans 8:21-22) wiping every tear from our eyes and bringing a permanent end to all the death and mourning and crying and pain that our sin has brought into the story. (Revelation 21:4)

Which means that, at long last, God and his people can spend the rest of forever doing what we were always meant to do: ruling with God and sharing in his abundant love, right here on earth. (Revelation 22:5)

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