Another familiar sentiment often bandied about is, “You get what you pay for.” Ok, let’s think about this one for a second. This is basically a statement referring to the quality of an item purchased. Yes, I know you know what it means but humor me.
So, you walk into Lowes and need a hammer. The manly man inside you, or aggressively-hammer-shopping-lady inside, sees the “Kobalt” brand steel hammer and yearns for it, but the tightwad inside sees the “Lil Helper” with handy plastic grip for a fraction of the price. Your two personas duke it out in the arena of your self-conscious shopping psyche and the tightwad wins out. You head home with the “Lil Helper” in tow and get to work on that shelf you’ve been meaning to fix for about three months now. You get about five minutes into the job, are enjoying the nature of the work, and SNAP! “Lil Helper” breaks like . . . something that breaks really easy.
You would like to berate yourself and throw a good natured man-fit that probably involves yelling at nothing in particular simply because you enjoy raising your voice, however, you realized . . . “You get what you pay for.”
Buy cheap, get cheap. We’ve seen this story play out in our lives numerous times. Jeans on sale = whole in the seat. Steal on eBay = Korean Scam. New cheaper cat food = a really bad day for the litter box.
But what if, what if, this saying didn’t always prove true. What if there was an aspect to our lives that no matter how hard we tried to make this pithy little principle fit, it just didn’t pan out?
Think about this for a second. What kind of life do you live? Do you call yourself a Christian? Do you adhere to the basic Christian principles of sin and righteous living? Have you always?
The fact is, there is a large part of the population who will one day find that this principle does indeed carry a titanic tone of truth when applied to their spiritual journey. Some will just keep on writing bad checks, keep on doing the same thing that’s made them miserable for years, and never stop to think how bad those checks are bouncing. Some people are content to find themselves investing in the shallow side of life for apparent short term “joy” or “gains.” One day those people will find themselves standing in front a broken shelf with a broken “Lil Helper” wincing at the words, “You get what you pay for.”
For the rest of us, this principle holds almost as much power as an echo on a cloudy day. There may have been a time in our lives when we sowed bad seed. We might have lived rotten lives, invested poorly in the spiritual side of life, and made cheap choices, but something happened and we changed. We took a step in the direction of a loving God who met us right at the point of our need and changed our lives forever. He ignored all the prices we tried to pay for flimsy peace, false security, and fickle prosperity. He saw only the price He paid.
John 3: 16 says it like this, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Someday the banks will close, the world will shudder, and time itself will turn on its head. God will look down on us and do one of two things. Either He will give us what we paid for, or He will give us what He paid for. What category will you be in?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment