Wednesday morning this newsletter was in my Inbox and I found it fitting for this week. Content credit and thanks to Tom Smith from the Heartland Synod for allowing us to share this thought for today.

What's a Person Worth?

There’s something of an obsession in our society about a person’s worth. What’s Bill Gates’ worth as opposed to Warren Buffet’s? or Mark Zuckerberg’s? Millionaires, billionaires, and zillionaires - it’s all so far beyond what we normal people experience that we really can’t even image it.

One scientist estimated that it would cost six quadrillion dollars to manufacture a person from scratch. I wonder how many zeros there are in a quadrillion.

Today I read a Facebook post about a little preschool girl with cancer, the daughter of a friend from years ago. Cancer. It’s tough. And today I remembered the death of a beautiful five-year-old girl - ten years ago today. How much are those young lives worth? There aren’t enough zeros, are there?

Remember Scott O’Grady, the pilot shot down over Serbia in the late 90s? For six days the world didn’t know if he was alive or dead, and then there came a dramatic rescue that brought him back to safety. Newsweek magazine reported that all the aircraft, weapons, and military hardware that it took to bring Scott home was valued at six billion dollars. Quite an investment to save one life.

God was infinitely creative when he made this world, when he made the people who populate it, and when he figured out the plan to bring them back to safety. The incarnation and Jesus’ death on the cross have no monetary value, there isn’t a number big enough. And that’s because God has placed an infinite, eternal value on each one of us. There aren’t enough zeros to express our value, there aren’t enough gold bars to pay the price. The ransom God paid was not merely metal, like gold or silver, no, God paid for us with the lifeblood of Jesus, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. (I Peter 1:18-19)

Good Friday and Easter are almost here and we’ll remember all these things once again.

What are you worth? Dollar signs and zeros can’t describe it. Only Jesus can, through his life, his love, his blood, his death, and his resurrection. His life for our life - that’s what we’re worth. This is how much value you have. Never forget it.