Jesus is worth it, is He?

A preacher in church this morning said ‘Jesus is worth it’. Instantly, I saw this as the crucial question of our times. We hear so many siren voices today. He compared them to radio stations vying for the same channel and frequency, coming and fading on the car radio, all selling contradictory solutions to the conundrum of 'the good life'. How can we know which ‘blessings’ will be 'delivered' and which are half truths or straight lies? A lot are.

I've never met a Christian who has said 'I really regret believing and being baptised' (and I never expect to). I have met those who later express regret in a) following political or philosophical ideas (ideologies built on mistakes) b) marrying someone (who turns out to be unloving and/or unfaithful) or c) doing certain things in their younger days (naivete and rebellion). Jesus is worth it for many reasons (far too many to set out here). His benefits include these.

By following Jesus one can:

• know the one Person who never leaves or abandons one (find a relationship of faithful love); 
• find God’s Truth (which is ultimate and absolute Truth) and discover how sin and the enemy are overcome at the Cross, through deeply understanding the Holy Scriptures (find spiritual wisdom); 
• find a community of decent people anywhere, instant friendship, partners in mission and even in life (find life to the full, find a global, real community) 

But one is also removing from the world:

• a lost soul endlessly looking for ‘myself’ (true identity) but being deceived into seeking what they will never find (lasting satisfaction) and what cannot 'deliver' (idols, covetousness); or, if they do attain their goal, either find that it is an empty or fractured 'prize', not worth all the effort, or that complete possession slips from their fingers; worst of all, it comes with too high a price tag and injures (e.g. thrillseekers wanting the sensation of 'being alive') 
• proto-anarchic, alienated, destructive tendencies intent on destroying or destabilising what is enduring, the innocent, society and the godly (innate hatred of God and goodness) - also see footnote on Fromm's 'syndrome of decay' 
• a 'consuming' materialist worldview (with its inner contradictions) 

Jesus is worth it for us individually but Jesus is also ‘worth it’ for society and the ongoing life of the world. He is The Life Force.

Eric Fromm identified the core of modernity as the ‘syndrome of decay’ or ‘necrophilia’, the urge to destroy everything meaningful and to crush true life, to turn everything into mechanics without meaning. It is the mechanistic mindset of those unconsciously serving the anti-life force (usually but not always in the form of profit, power and greed) attempting to make everything uniform  - and thereby 'controllable'.