Do you sometimes reflect on the price you have paid for certain things in your life? I’m not speaking primarily about material purchases. I’m talking more about the price you may have paid for things like pleasing others, meeting people’s expectations, making a given amount of money, having a certain type of appearance, achieving certain things in your life, or being “good enough in order to be loved.”
I have spent a lifetime trying to impress others in order to win their approval in order to be good enough to be loved. I can say now that this “impress others to be loved” strategy doesn’t work. Most of you are way ahead of me in knowing that trying to impress others, even when we succeed, does not make us feel loved. And so often the price we have to pay to try to impress is far too expensive.
As I move along in years, I realize that one of the greatest tricks I have experienced is one that has caused me to pay a large sum for things that are of little value. “All the enemy has to do,” my good friend Gary Moon told me years ago, “is sneak into the jewelry store of our lives and switch the price tags. We then end up paying a high price for jewels that end up being of little value.” As that description has captured my soul, I have come to realize that “the enemy” is primarily me and “one of the greatest tricks” is one that I have played on myself—that I have believed that I have to be good enough in order to be loved.
“All the enemy has to do,” my good friend Gary Moon told me years ago, “is sneak into the jewelry store of our lives and switch the price tags.”
Many of us have heard the message, which we have internalized (and for which we are now responsible): be great, accomplish a lot, achieve much in order to be loved and happy. Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist, once quoted a colleague of his as saying to psychiatrists just beginning their careers, “Be a good psychiatrist, but don’t be a great psychiatrist. Being a great psychiatrist means you have paid too high a price in terms of other things that are more important.”
I have come to cherish the words of Jesus in Revelation 3:17 and 18: “You say, ’I am rich, with everything I want; I don’t need a thing!’ And you don’t realize that spiritually you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. My advice to you is to buy pure gold from me, gold purified by fire—only then will you truly be rich” (TLB).
To reverse the trick I’ve allowed to be played on me, I’m praying that God will help me buy true gold from Him for a price that has already been paid through Christ rather than buy fool’s gold with a price that does damage to my soul and my relationships. Have you allowed “one of the greatest tricks” to be played on you? What price have you paid? Do you, too, need to buy from Christ gold purified by fire so that you are spending the precious currency of your life on what truly fulfills?