Great Value

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure that a man discovered hidden in a field. In his excitement, he hid it again and sold everything he owned to get enough money to buy the field. Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a merchant on the lookout for choice pearls. When he discovered a pearl of great value, he sold everything he owned and bought it! Matthew 13:44-46

ALL OF US —including our children —are constantly making trades. We trade an allotment of time spent on a project for the satisfaction of the job completed. We trade the effort of exercise or athletic practice for achievement of physical goals or victory in competition. We trade money for food, clothing, services, and such. Sometimes we make really good trades so that we end up ahead. Other times, we make foolish trades so that what we gain is worth nowhere near as much as what we traded away to get it.

But Jesus promises us that we will never be disappointed by anything we let go of to get more of him. He promises that having him as our King now and into eternity will be worth our submission to his authority and our embrace of his economy. The good news of his gospel is that we can lose everything this world tells us has value —reputation, opportunity, wealth, power, attractiveness —and still have everything that will make us happy forever if we have him. When the apostle Paul compared the value of things of this world to the person of Christ, he was able to say, “Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). Oh, that our children will have eyes to see what is —namely who is —of infinite and eternal worth so that they will discover the happy trade-off of losing everything on earth to gain Christ.

Lord, I not only want ________ to see the great value of knowing and being ruled by you, but I need to see it and believe it too. Because I hate to see ________ lose out on anything in this life, I find that I want him to have everything the world offers as well as everything to be found in Christ. And that simply doesn’t make sense. Lord, if it costs ________ everything to have you, he will not be losing out. Just don’t let him gain the whole world but lose his soul.