FAITH FILES
WHAT is something worth? Followers of BBC1’s Bargain Hunt will know it’s often a lot less than you’d hoped! Essentially an object’s value is simply what someone is willing to pay for it. A painting (like one of mine) might sell for two figures, yet a more valued signature on it could add any number of noughts to that.
You could calculate something’s worth in terms of the cost of the material that makes it up and the value of the labour put into creating it. But if that item isn’t wanted now because fashions or needs have changed you will never get that back.
A church building is a vast project which demands sacrificial giving from those involved in erecting it, but when there is a no longer a congregation to fill and use it, what value has it?
You might say the same about Pride Park Stadium: to realise what he wanted for it, its owner needed to find someone willing to buy it. And had there been no club left to play in it (God forbid!) would it have had any value to anyone else?
You could also ask about you and me: what value do we have? Each body contains various elements and substances worth about £14. Yet if we look at the market value of the organs and complex molecules that make up the body? One estimate puts your total worth, if all your components could be harvested, at £37million!
But to the person who loves you, a parent, a partner, a child, you are of infinite worth, one for whom they would pay any price.
Of course, in Oscar Wilde’s famous play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington famously describes a cynic as “A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
To those who love you, you are not infinitely costly but infinitely valuable – and not least to God, your creator. One of the Bible’s most famous texts is John 3,16: “this shows how much God loved every one of us: He gave his one and only Son to die in our place, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
If other people ever make you feel worthless, remember that you are always of infinite worth to God, your heavenly Father, and lovely in his sight.
Rev Philip Webb,
Baptist Minister