Madness. A peculiar madness has infected all mankind, warping the heart and setting it aflame with an insane addiction to worthless, lethal lovers and a disastrous disdain for precious, life-giving realities.
And yet, astoundingly, we have no doubts. We are so certain of our ability to determine something’s worth, trading what we deem worthless for what we deem worthwhile, showing what we consider trash & what treasure. It is a tragic irony how our default disposition is to happily exchange what can heal & satisfy us for the fleeting highs that only further sicken, parch, & slay us.
It would depend who you ask, though. The vast majority would say Christianity is a laughable waste: “Obey & surrender your life to some god? Let your reality be shaped by what some ancient book of fairy tales says? Give up what feels so good? Forego what your heart is telling you? And all for nothing. Insanity — a fool’s trade.”
The Christian responds to this mindset with grieved compassion: “Will you not give up the passing pleasures of sin in exchange for the lasting pleasure of knowing your Creator & Savior? Will you white-knuckle clench what won’t last and can’t satisfy to your soul’s doom rather than repent, embrace Jesus, and live forever? That is insanity.”
And you can wake-up too late. The day will come when the trade we’ve habitually made our entire lives will be eternally final.
Jesus asks us, “What good is it to gain the world, if in the end you lose your soul?”
We all have a choice to make.
But an ultimate mad exchange occurred once that made it possible for us to even have hope.
God Himself, seeing that humankind had wickedly rebelled against Him, looked down from Heaven. His justice demanded that evil be punished; His great love devised a way to redeem. Exchanging the power, pleasure, & privileges of being God in Heaven, Jesus Christ came down to enter into our troubled, painful world in the form of a human baby —still fully God, but now wrapped in human flesh. Though our Creator, He became like His creatures, experiencing all that we do in order to sympathize with us. And yet, very unlike us, He was perfect. God planned to make a mad exchange: the eternal Hell & Death we deserved for our sins would be suffered by Jesus; the eternal Heaven & Life only He deserved would be gifted to us. Our estrangement from God would be suffered by Jesus; reconciliation & Jesus’s sweet closeness with God would be gifted to us.The moral filthiness we possessed would be placed on Jesus; His moral perfection would be gifted to us. God the Father exchanged His precious Son Jesus to ransom sinners like us.
And all that remains for us now is to make the most logical exchange in the universe, with God’s help. By putting our faith in Jesus, who died & rose from the dead to accomplish salvation, we renounce everything and joyfully forsake all others for God. We count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus.
His mad exchange affords us the chance to make the only sane one. Will we?