An Estimate

It was in the relatively early hours of the morning quite recently that I was awoken by an accident right outside our house. In fact, the driver had lost control of his vehicle, knocked down part of our wall and then ploughed into the drive posts and knocked them down. It was quite a mess and the car looked a wreck. Fortunately, the driver wasn't badly hurt but was taken by ambulance to hospital just to make sure. Now we have the task of getting someone to rebuild the damaged wall and replace the posts at the ends of the wall. 'Get an estimate from a builder, and submit it to the insurers', we have been told.

This got me thinking. What is an estimate? It's not exact but it is intended to give us a rough idea of what it will cost to get things repaired and restored. An expert eye will be able to give us a figure from which we can get the go-ahead for things to be fixed.

If we were asked to put an estimate on human life, what might we say? What is a life worth? Reading in the news of a bungled murder by two people who had been paid to kill someone, I wondered what value they had put upon the life of their potential victim. What is our life worth? The value will change, depending on who you ask. I would expect my family to put a higher price on my life than my employers! However, the gospel (the message of the Bible) tells us that the highest price placed upon a human life is that which God has placed. God's love for each one of us caused Him to give His only Son to die upon a Roman cross outside Jerusalem. The reason? It was because God loved us, valued us so highly, that He was prepared to punish His Son for our sin and guilt that we might go free.

We cannot measure the value of that tremendous gift of God's love. We cannot measure the price that the Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son, had to pay to remove the penalty that we would have to pay on account of our sin. But the question that has to be asked is this, 'Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Saviour?' Are you prepared to acknowledge and accept the estimate of value God has put upon your life? Sadly, for some, life is cheap. Many live life for the present and ignore the price that God was willing to pay to secure your future with Him. What about you?