Worth The Cost?

Every Monday we have a staff meeting (Claude likes to call it our "staff infection") and we always start by praying for new and ongoing prayer requests and reading outloud a couple chapters each from the Bible. The last few weeks we've been meeting at Panera Bread and this week we started reading Revelation. I had to wonder what people sitting nearby might be thinking as they listened to four guys reading from the book of Revelation, but that's beside the point.

When I read Revelation 3:18 and it talked about buying things from God I had to ask some questions. My first was, "I thought we didn't have to earn anything from God...why was he encouraging people to buy stuff from him?" Then I wondered what kind of money we'd use to buy stuff from God. How much would it take? Does anything ever go on clearance or is shopping at God's place an upscale experience? Besides that, why buy gold since that'd be like buying pavement since the streets are made of gold? You might think I'm joking with these questions, but this is actually what goes through my head sometimes.

After thinking about it, I came down here. Obedience is costly. Discipleship is costly. Becoming like Christ is costly. It may cost materially, but more often the cost is measured in the difficulty of selfLESSness. It's hard to put others first, hard to love the 'unlovable,' hard to always do the right thing (especially when the wrong thing is so easy and unnoticable to others), and it's hard to deal with the truth of who we so often are - selfish people.

Is it worth the cost? Is what the Bible calls "righteousness" worth paying for? Absolutely. Yet even as I write that I know there will still be times when I choose to invest my resources someplace else.