They say that there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes. It’s pretty depressing. And yet we run around working hard, achieving things, so certain that tomorrow I’ll do this and next week I’ll do that. But what if there is no tomorrow for you? Then what?

So many things in this life appear to be incredibly certain. Real estate for instance. For the majority of my life time in Australia real estate has been a brilliant investment. When I was growing up there was a saying ‘you can’t lose on real estate’. And so the Australian dream, as they called it, is for everybody to own their own house.

I’ve been at auctions where people have bid ridiculous prices because they were afraid of missing out on their dream. And banks were equally duped by the market, they were happy to lend money on these ridiculous prices because of course with a loan came a mortgage.

Now a mortgage is a registered instrument of security, some call it ‘surety’ and surety is what we’re chatting about today on the program. Another way of saying it is that it’s a certainty or security. The deal is if you sell your house for any reason legally you have to pay the loan out as part of that sale and if you don’t make your payments the bank can come along and foreclose and sell the house from under you to get its money back.

That’s fantastic when it’s all going well, when the market is on an up and up but over the last decade and a half we’ve actually seen real estate prices fall. People were shocked, bank foreclosures went up, people were out in the street, they couldn’t sell their houses for anywhere near the amount that they paid for them. And it kind of pulled the rug out from under people’s financial certainty.

Hang on a minute; you can’t lose on real estate! Yeah? Sure you can. It’s just that for a long time it was such a great investment. People often described it as a rock solid investment and now having learned the hard way we realise that real estate, like any other financial instrument, has its ups and it has its downs.

And if it’s happened in a country like Australia which weathered the global financial crisis pretty well by international standards, then think about how many Americans feel; how those in Spain and Italy feel; Portugal and other countries that have been hit really hard by the financial crisis.

Okay Berni why are you rabbiting on about real estate today? Well it’s not so much real estate that I’m on about, it’s this subject of certainty, security, surety. We behave as though so many things in our lives that truly are quite insecure are in fact rock solid.

The stock market often behaves that way when it’s on a bull run. People start buying in and buying at ever inflated prices, prices that are based much more on market sentiment than on the underlying fundamentals of a company. And then we’re surprised when the bubble bursts and the market plummets.

But historically markets have always had corrections, always for as long as there have been share markets they’ve fallen as well as risen. My point today is this, wealth is not a sure thing, even if you have millions, billions locked away tight in an investment or bank account, wealth is not a sure thing.

And anyone whose security is bound up in their wealth is at some point in their lives due for a correction, a rude awakening, a shock when they come to realise that money isn’t the rock solid thing that they thought it would be.

Let’s imagine that you spend your life building up a great deal of wealth and that’s relative depending on where you live and where your life is at. You can be a labourer in Bangladesh and work hard and save and build an asset base which is significant in the society and the context in which you live. Or you can be a wealthy business woman in New York or China who’s worth billions, it’s all relative.

But let’s say in your context you build a healthy asset base and all of a sudden you feel a bit of a lump under your arm. So you go to the Doctor, he does a few tests and they tell you that you have cancer and only have a few weeks to live. What, let me ask you, is your wealth worth to you then huh?

I used to have this ridiculous saying, ‘well you know, if I can’t take it with me I’m not going’. Just stop and think about that, how patently absurd that is. At some point we’re all going and none of us, none of us is taking one cent, one penny, one rupee, one anything with us, not a zack, nothing. So then what will it all be worth?

Can I ask you a question, what are you striving for in your life and is it really worth it? What do you put your trust in, is it really that secure? This is how Jesus put this whole security thing into perspective, Matthew chapter 6, verse 19:

“Don’t store up for yourselves treasures here on earth where moth and rust consume, where thieves can break in and steal but instead store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust consumes, where thieves cannot break in and steal. For where your treasure is there your heart will also be.”

I know of one man who had a very expensive wine collection, hugely expensive. He was a well-known stock broker; his wines were worth into the millions of dollars. It was so important to store the older wines in a controlled environment that he paid money to a firm to store his wines in constant temperature and humidity and low light.

He thought it was all secure until he discovered that one of the employees at that firm had been stealing his wine one bottle at a time, carefully removing the wine and replacing it with cold tea. See nothing’s certain, nothing’s safe.

And yet people carry on sacrificing to the false god of wealth as though that’s what life is all about. Come on, wake up! That’s what Jesus is saying here, why are you doing this? There’s an eternal reality here. Stand back, think about it, is what you’re doing really worth it? Are the things that you’re placing your trust and security in really worthy of your trust?

Or are there other realities, much bigger realities, life and death realities that demand us to take a fresh look, to take a look at surety and security from a whole different perspective? Well?

It’s kind of a funny week on the program this week because we’re finishing up a four week series on money and wealth and yet it’s Easter week. In a few days we’ll be remembering the amazing sacrifice that Jesus made for us on that cross and yet when you think about it talking about wealth and death is pretty appropriate for Easter week:

“For where your treasure is there your heart will also be.”

So where’s your treasure? All wrapped up in the comfort and pleasures of life that seem so important now, oh so certain now. Or have you figured out there is a much bigger reality out there, there’s a true wealth here and now, a wealth that goes way, way, way beyond anything money can buy.

And a true wealth tomorrow, for all eternity as you live out your eternity in the presence of the one true living God; the God who sent Jesus His Son to die for you and me so that our sins can be forgiven. As Jesus said in the parable of the wealthy man who was so smug about all the stuff he had accumulated, the man who built ever larger store houses to put his stuff into, Jesus said:

“You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you and those things that you’ve prepared whose will they then be? So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.” (Luke 12:20-21)

As we step day by day inexorably closer to Easter, inexorably closer to that cross that asks so many questions of us, let me ask you this, are you living your life as a fool or as a wise person? Who or what are you putting your trust into?

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I spent the first thirty six years of my life sacrificing my all in order to be wealthy. Long hours, masses of emotional energy, time not spent with my family and the wealthier I became on the outside the poorer I found myself on the inside. Hey that’s no way to live a life is it?

Okay here’s the thing we’re going to explore today on the program, who or what are you serving? Who or what are you pouring all your energies into? When we really want something what we do is we sacrifice other things so that we can have that thing.

For example when I was a young man about eighteen years old I really wanted to buy a car, I wanted to be mobile. So the man living next door to my parents had a second hand car for sale. We knew it was a good car; it was fairly priced so I bought it.

Problem was all of a sudden that took a whole bunch of money out of circulation for me so I had to go without other things in order to own my car. Sometimes, I remember, my friends were going out for dinner on a Friday or Saturday night, they’d invite me along but I had to decline because I didn’t have enough money. Why? Because I’d spent it on my car.

Same when I bought my first house, that was a real stretch I have to tell you and the more things I bought, well you guessed it, the more things I wanted. My favourite subjects at school were pure mathematics and English, specifically English literature. I mean I love physics too, I really like quantum mechanics and if money hadn’t been an issue I probably would have become a physicist.

But pretty early on I realised there’s not a lot of money in being a researcher or academic so instead I studied computer science as it was called back then, information technology these days, because that’s where I thought the money would be and I was right. And as my IT career progressed I realised I could milk this for a lot of money. So I worked harder and harder and harder at it to the detriment of everything else; to the detriment of my faith, my family and my friendships.

As I look back on that time in my life now, hopefully with some measure of greater wisdom, this is what I see: an ambitious young man who sacrificed the most important things in life, faith, family and friendships, on the altar of wealth and success. Everything has a cost in this world.

As we observed last week on the program there’s pretty much no such thing as an overnight success and our chances of winning the lottery are so close to zero we might as well not bother. If you want to be good at something, if you want to have something, a career, a house, a car, an Olympic gold medal for that matter, whatever it is you have to work hard for it, you have to sacrifice this to get that.

And so that’s where I come back to my original question to you, who or what are you sacrificing for and is it worth it?

Last week if you were able to join me I shared with you what Jesus had to say on this subject of counting the cost. Here it is again in case you missed it, Luke chapter 14 beginning at verse 28:

“For which of you intending to build a tower doesn’t first sit down to estimate the cost to see whether he has enough money to complete it? Otherwise when he’s laid a foundation and it’s not able to be finished all who see it will begin to ridicule him saying, ‘this guy began to build and he wasn’t able to finish it.”

“Or what king going out to wage war against another king won’t first sit down and consider whether he’s able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot then while the other is still far away he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.”

In other words the last thing we should do is just kind of head off and commit to something whether it’s building a tower or waging war. Unless we first do some deliberate thinking and planning to figure out whether we have the resources to build the tower or win the war.

Interesting but when the US President who is also the Commander in Chief of the American military forces is considering military action one of the things that he considers is the force depletion report, an assessment of how many troops and resources he is likely to lose in committing to the action. In other words first he counts the cost.

What’s your life committed to? What are you sacrificing your life to? Have you counted the cost? Have you asked yourself, what is this costing me, my faith, my friends, my family? Is it really worth it? Do I have the energy and the resources to see this through and even if I do is the prize at the end of all this worth the huge sacrifice?

You know if I could do one thing over in my life I’d consider the cost of my pursuit of wealth and success because in a deep painful way I had to learn the lesson for myself. It simply wasn’t worth it. In fact it drove me to the brink of suicide.

When Jesus was talking there about counting the cost He was talking about it in the context of people choosing at a fork in the road of their lives between this and that. Between chasing after the things of this world or following Him because the point He was making, well if you follow me, if you choose my way in life there’s going to be a cost, it’s not easy.

It’s going to cost you something so before you head off in my direction count the cost and ask yourself, ‘do I really want to pay the price? Is it really worth it? Is that what I want?’

I guess as the Christian celebration of Easter approaches in just a few days that’s a question each one of us needs to ask ourselves. Some will say, yeah it is, many will answer no it’s not. That’s your choice, not one I can make for you, not one anyone else can make for you, not something I can shove down your throat, you have to answer that question, you have to choose.

We each get to choose our own way in life, this way or that way. It’s good that we have a choice, we should have a choice but please don’t just head off in this direction or that without thinking about it, without weighing the cost, without assessing the force depletion report. Whatever way you choose count the cost and ask yourself, is this way really worth the sacrifice?

Interestingly Jesus had a choice to make too, a choice between going to the cross and being crucified, to pay the price of my sin and yours or opting out and taking the easy road. He wasn’t forced to the cross, He wasn’t dragged there kicking and screaming against His will, Jesus chose the cross, that gruesome death that we’re going to remember this coming Friday, Good Friday. Have a listen, John chapter 10 and verse 14:

“Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd, I know my own and my own know me just as the Father knows me and I know the Father and I lay my life down for my sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong in this fold, I must bring them also and they will listen to my voice so they will be one flock and one shepherd.”

“For this reason the Father loves me because I choose to lay down my life in order to take it up again. Make no mistake no one’s taking it away from me, I am willingly laying it down of my own accord. I have the power to lay it down and I have the power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

See Jesus had a choice, He knew the cost. Being nailed brutally hands and feet to a cross and hung up there to die an excruciating death of suffocation in agonising pain. Nah He knew the cost but He decided that the prize was worth it and what was the prize? What is the prize? The prize is you, the prize is me, the prize is every man, woman and child that would look upon Jesus, this Son of the living God, as the one who would save them from the consequences of their rebellion against God, their sin.

He knew the cost, He knew the prize, you and me and He decided, He decided that we were worth it.

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Have you ever wondered ‘what’s life worth’? To be more specific about it, what’s your life worth to you? This is the week that Christians around the world celebrate Easter and as it turns out it’s all about the value of life, your life.

These last few weeks on the program we’ve been talking a lot about money and more specifically about wealth which is about what we think about money. Wealth is a word that’s all about our love of money and as we’ve seen it’s the love of money that’s the root of all kinds of evil and it causes many, many people to pierce themselves with many pains.

Each day this week we’re taking another step closer to Easter. This Friday is the day that many people around the world will solemnly remember the amazing sacrifice that Jesus, whom they believe to be the Son of God, made for them.

And as this program goes to air today in a hundred and sixty countries with tens of millions of people listening one of the things I’m really conscious of is that there are all sorts of people in all sorts of cultures with all sorts of different beliefs and the last thing I want to do is ram anything down anyone’s throat.

That’s not what Jesus did and certainly I’m not in the business of doing that either. What’s the point? It doesn’t help anyone but what I do want to do today is have us all think about life, the value of our own lives. That’s why I want to reflect on what it is that Jesus is supposed to have done and there’s pretty solid evidence, historical evidence, that He did by getting Himself nailed to a cross almost two thousand years ago.

See it’s a great time at Easter to stop and pause from the hum drum of the lives we lead and just think about the value of our lives.

I was listening to an Aboriginal man speaking on the radio the other day; Aboriginals are the native people of Australia. Culturally they were nomadic and still today the pace of their lives, the cadence if you will, is much gentler and much slower than that of the busy westerner who’s racing around in the city looking miserable.

And this man was observing the contrast between the traditional Aboriginal lifestyle and the pace at which we live in the so called developed world. The point I guess he was making is that there’s a gentleness and a kindness that underpins Aboriginal culture whereas here in the city we’re all so busy at being busy, making money, carving our careers that all too often we look miserable because we are miserable. It’s a great observation don’t you think?

Many of us in the culture that I live in behave as though the things we’re working for are more important than our own lives. Just let me say that again because it’s the crux of what we’re chatting about today on the program. By our behaviour many of us demonstrate that the things we’re working for are more important than our own lives.

I know a young man in his mid-thirties, so he’s young as far as I’m concerned, who is working so hard for a corporation. They don’t appreciate him, they don’t reward him, they pile more and more work on his back and yet he’s sacrificing his life on this altar of work whilst at the same time he’s being deeply miserable, he feels trapped.

Is that any way to live your life? What’s your life worth? One of the things about this whole Easter thing is that it’s built around sacrifice but the right sort of sacrifice. So wherever you’re at, whatever you might believe, just humour me here a bit.

Let’s say that this Jesus is who He says He is, the Son of God. Let’s just say He did allow Himself to be nailed to a cross to suffer and to die for my sin, the things I’ve done wrong and yours. Let’s assume for a moment that all that stuff’s true. Instead of me being punished by a just God, Jesus takes the punishment on my behalf so that I can receive free forgiveness. That’s what the story of Easter is all about.

What does that say about the value of my life, of your life? Here’s the Apostle Paul’s take on answering that question in his letter to the Roman Church almost two thousand years ago. Have a listen, Romans chapter 5, verses 7 and 8:

“Rarely anyone will die for a righteous person although perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

It’s pretty true isn’t it? It’s a pretty rare thing for someone to lay down their life even for a fantastically amazingly good person but to lay your life down for someone who’s your enemy, now that’s amazing and yet that’s what Jesus did, at least that’s what they tell us.

So if He was, if He is the Son of God and if He did do what it says that He did, what does that say about the value of my life and your life? Well I think it says that you and I are a whole bunch more valuable than the things we tend to think are valuable in this world.

We’re a whole bunch more valuable, you and I, at least in Gods eyes than the money we work so hard to earn, the careers we sacrifice so much to carve out, the status and the position we seek in society and in the work place, the recognition that we crave for.

We’re way, way, way more valuable than all of those things put together and yet countless people spend their lives, I use those three words very deliberately, they spend their lives in order to get the things that are much less valuable than the value that this God who sent Jesus, says our lives actually have.

Do you find that just moderately confronting, does that bother you? Does pausing sober you up a little bit and put life into perspective? See we each spend our lives, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the years slips by and before you know it you’re coming to the close of your days here on this earth.

See we all spend our lives on something and it seems that more and more people are spending more and more of their lives on having rather than on being, on accumulating rather than on experiencing peace and joy and contentment and satisfaction.

Whatever you may believe, wherever you might be at in your life’s journey at the moment I’m hoping that you find this aspect of Easter, the value of your life confronting and challenging. I’m hoping it gives you cause to consider the value of your life and ask yourself, ‘am I spending this precious, precious life of mine on the right things, the things that are worth it?’

Just want to read that particular verse of Scripture one more time and add to it the point, the conclusion of what Gods saying to us through the Apostle Paul. So here we go again, Romans chapter 5 beginning at verse 8:

“God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we’ve been justified by his blood will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son then much more surely, having been reconciled, we’ll be saved by his life.”

The whole point of Easter is the amazing mind blowing sacrifice of Gods Son’s life for the likes of you and me while we were still, in effect, at war with God.

As you probably can tell I’m pretty definite about what I believe. I believe that Jesus is the Son of the living God, the one true God, the God who loves you and me so much that He would make such an amazing sacrifice. And every time I stop and think about what Jesus did for me and for you it rocks me to the core.

That amazing act of grace so that I can be completely forgiven has changed my life. See it’s caused me to completely re-evaluate what I was worth and what I was spending my worth on and I realised I wasn’t so much spending my life, I was wasting it on things that weren’t worth it.

The price that Jesus paid for you and me, the very life of the Son of God, is utterly amazing. It tells us what you and I are in fact worth in the eyes, in the heart of God and that right there is a complete game changer, that’s what Easter is really all about.

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Too many people these days are drowning in debt – whether it’s a spending spree on credit cards, whether its people in debt to loan sharks, whether it’s simply not being able to make ends meet. People are drowning in debt and surprisingly debt is what Easter is actually all about.

You know as I sat at home in my study earlier this week, getting ready to jot down some thoughts about this whole thing of debt, I let out a big sigh. I was kind of thinking, ‘where do you begin with this whole thing about debt?’ You see debt is a double edged sword, it can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing. In fact it goes further than that; debt can be really, really good and it can be really, really bad.

So how can debt be a good thing? Well there’s an old German proverb which goes something like this. ‘Geld macht geld’ which translated means ‘money makes money’. In other words if you have some money it’s easier to make more money and so companies when they have a good business plan, a plan that’s likely to end up with a profitable outcome, they go out and raise some capital.

Sometimes they do that by selling shares in the company which is what a Stock Market float is all about and sometimes they do it by borrowing money, and provided that their business plan is a good one then they’re going to make more money. So debt can be a good thing when it’s about investing into a money making asset.

Borrowing an affordable amount of money to buy a house is in the same category. but for many people debt is a bad thing. It’s a bad thing financially and it can be a bad thing legally. I know a lot of people who have bought houses that are way more expensive than they can afford. And then there’s the colour televisions and all the gadgets and the nice car and furniture and accessories and on and on and on the list goes. Before they know it the credit cards are maxed out and they’re struggling to pay their mortgage.

And you see this happen irrespective where in the socio economic spectrum you look. I’ve seen apparently really wealthy people lash out on ridiculously expensive houses and cars and boats and lavish lifestyles, much of it financed through debt based on an unrealistic expectation that an economic prosperity cycle will go on for ever. Well it doesn’t, it never ever does. Does it? At some point things come crashing down.

And I’ve seen people who are way at the other end of the financial spectrum enticed similarly by baubles and trinkets that they just had to have and then not being able to put food on the table.

Greed – and that’s what over consumption is all about – greed knows no boundary. I know a man who’s counselled dozens of former high flying wealthy executives and business people who had it all and now they’re down to their last few million and they’re at the point of suicide. Gee, you know what, I’d be pretty happy with a few million.

Whatever form debt takes there is only one way to work your way out of it and that way is working your way out of it. Ultimately you have to pay the money back. That can take years; years of hard work and some people never do. Some people have to declare bankruptcy. Some even, as I said, come to the point of taking their own lives.

There’s a form of legal debt too. If you or I commit a crime and we’re convicted of that crime according to the laws of the land, we then become debtors to society. As they say ‘if you do the crime you have to do the time’. A man convicted of murder let’s say might be sentenced to twenty five years in prison. Twenty five years of loss of freedom as a punishment for the crime. That’s a twenty five year debt.

But when it comes to the end of that twenty five years and he’s set free he’s worked off that debt. When he walks from the prison a free man he has paid his debt off. That’s the way things work in this world. A debt has to be paid off. See none of us have much of a problem in understanding that even if sometimes we have a problem with paying our debts off.

Tomorrow is a day that Christians refer to as Good Friday. It’s a day when they remember a man called Jesus who claimed to be the Son of God, who claimed to have come to do something completely that flies in the face of what we’ve just been talking about, what we understand about paying off a debt. Have a listen to these two Scripture verses, firstly John chapter 3, verse 16:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, Jesus, so that whoever believes in him wouldn’t perish but would have eternal life.”

And again Romans chapter 3, verses 22 to 25:

“For there is no distinction since all have fallen short of the glory of God but they are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.”

See, to be justified is to have a right standing with the law again, in this case with God. So the man who leaves the prison after twenty five years, the man who’s paid off his debt to society is said, in legal terms, to be justified. He now has a right standing with the law as though he’d never committed the crime, if that makes sense.

But here, and this is the thing that challenges me about Easter, whatever you believe, wherever you’re at, someone else pays the debt. That’s the point of Jesus dying on the cross. No one ever explained this to me particularly well in my early days and so I’m just taking a moment or two to explain it to you.

God, like the law, is just. If you do the crime you have to do the time and yet because of His love He finds another way to meet the requirements of His just nature. He lets His Son Jesus take the punishment that you and I so richly deserve. We have a word for that, it’s called grace.

If you committed a crime and someone else offered willingly to do twenty five years in prison for you, hey would you be amazed? Would you be blessed? Absolutely you would. That’s what Easter’s about, someone else, Jesus, the very Son of God gets nailed to a cross. He takes the punishment that you and I deserve and so that when we put our faith in Him and what He’s done we receive the free gift of forgiveness and the free gift of eternal life.

Now whatever you do with that that’s entirely up to you, I’m just saying, each one of us needs to make our own choices in life – reject it; accept it. That’s the core, that’s the heart, that’s the crux of the message of Easter – that someone else paid the price.

And that’s why they talk about Jesus as being their Saviour, these Christians, that’s why I call Jesus my Saviour because He saves me from the wrath of God, from the punishment that I so richly deserve for having turned my back on Him. It was an act of supreme love; it was THE act of supreme love in all of human history, 1 John chapter 4, verse 10:

“In this is love. Not that we love God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

And as I said what you do with that is totally a choice for you but for me it’s radically changed my life. I guess for many years I kind of realised God was real but deep down I knew if He was I couldn’t ever approach Him because I knew I wasn’t good enough, I just knew and yet when I wrap my heart and mind around the Easter message I finally, finally realised that’s the whole point.

I can never be worthy of God, that’s why Jesus had to die for me, the perfect sacrifice to make me, the imperfect one, perfect in the eyes of God, my debt fully and completely paid. I don’t have to work my way out of my debt with God, indeed I can’t because the hole that I’ve dug for myself through my rebellion, my sin, is way, way, way too deep so instead, for our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin so in Him we might become the righteousness of God.

The moment I believed in Jesus, the moment you believe in Jesus, the sacrifice Jesus made for us gives us the very same right standing with God, that’s what righteousness means, as Jesus has. Hey that’s an awesome message, that’s the message of Easter and that is why they call it the Good News.

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I don’t know about you but whilst I don’t want to be really, really wealthy it’s kind of nice to have a bit of money. It’s great to be able to put food on the table, a roof over our heads and every now and then to be able to afford just the odd little luxury. So what would you call a man who died without even owning the shirt on his back? A loser perhaps?

In this world success seems to be most commonly measured by how much stuff we amass. Someone is successful if they’re quite obviously rich. I was watching a TV show recently where a couple, I’m guessing that were in their late thirties or early forties, had purchased a large grand old country manor in the UK for two and a half million pounds sterling and they were spending another one and a half million pounds on renovating it.

That’s four million pounds on a house, a big one mind you but nevertheless a house. They told us on the show that the man had made his fortune in some high tech business. By the world’s standards that guy was successful. His wife was able to hire a full time worker to keep the place clean, now that is success right?

Mm, I wonder. How do you measure success? Is it by how much money and how many things people have? Is it by what sort of a house they live in or how prestigious their car is or how big the woman’s diamond ring is, how big the company is that the people own, that sort of stuff?

I guess it’s easy to think that way because that’s how most people think, that’s how the world works and in a very real sense that’s how we’ve been taught to think, that’s how we’re encouraged in many ways to think.

But here’s the crazy thing, what I’ve discovered is that I can look just as good in a cheap shirt and a cheap pair of trousers that I purchased at some discount store as I can in an expensive designer label outfit. I’ve discovered the inexpensive Japanese sedan that I drive around town doesn’t make me any more or less happy than the expensive up market saloon car that I used to drive when I was working as a high priced IT consultant many years ago.

You can have a lot of stuff but find yourself on the brink of suicide which is exactly where I was twenty years ago and so when you stop and think about things you realise that stuff doesn’t make you happy, really and that we need something else to fill our lives.

But just imagine, imagine you were going through what has to be the most stressful and painful experience of life, death, your own death. Imagine even your own execution and you didn’t even own the shirt on your back. How would you manage all that? The world would look at you and think, failure, failure. Failure with a capital F.

Today is what many people refer to as Good Friday. It’s a day when Christians around the world, not so much celebrate but remember and commemorate that Jesus, reputedly the Son of God, was nailed to a cross for them to pay their debt, to pay for their sin.

I don’t know what you believe but that’s what for well over a billion people on planet earth today is all about, Good Friday. Here’s the story, John chapter 19 beginning at verse 16:

“So they took Jesus and carrying the cross by himself he went out to what is called the ‘place of the skull’ which in Hebrew is called Golgotha. There they crucified him and with two others, one on either side with Jesus between them. Pontius Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross; it read ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews.”

“Many of the Jews read this inscription because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin and in Greek. Then the Chief Priests of the Jews said to Pilate, ‘don’t write the king of the Jews but this man said I am the king of the Jews’ and Pilate answered, ‘what I have written I have written.”

“When the soldiers had crucified Jesus they took his clothes and divided them into four parts, one for each soldier. They also took his tunic. The tunic was seamless woven into one piece from top to bottom so they said to one another, ‘lets not tear it apart but lets cast lots for it to see who will get it.’ This was to fulfil the Scripture which says, ‘they divided my clothes among them and for my clothing they cast lots.’ And that’s exactly what the soldiers did.”

Now there’s not a serious historian alive today who doesn’t agree this Jesus actually existed or that He was indeed crucified. What of course people do disagree on is whether He is who He says He was and whether, as Christians would have you believe, He rose again from the dead. Now that’s a whole separate discussion that.

But let’s just imagine for a moment, humour me here, let’s just imagine for a moment that He was indeed who He says He was, the Son of God. That He died for the reason that He said He was going to die, to pay the legal price, as it were, for my sin and yours for our rebellion against God so that we could be forgiven.

Now I know there are many people listening today who may not believe that. Okay I understand that but just for a minute lets assume that it’s true and that raises a question, if it is what does that say about success and failure in a world where success equals how much stuff you’ve amassed before you die?

See Jesus owned nothing, nothing. He didn’t have a house, He didn’t have an investment property, a car, a donkey and even though apparently He went around doing a whole bunch of good things, even healing people so they say, He comes to this ignominious end, convicted as a criminal and nailed to a cross.

But not only that, the tunic, the one possession that He did have even that they take away from Him and soldiers cast lots to see who would own it. Without any shadow of a doubt there hanging on that cross in the world’s eyes was a loser.

But if He was indeed the Son of God what does that tell us about God? Well one option is that Gods was weak and couldn’t protect or defend His Son. Mm, sure that’s an option. The other option is that this God is humble, prepared to suffer and die, prepared to be a loser in the worlds eyes in order to make you and me a winner in His.

What does that say to you about God? Well I can’t answer that question for you, that’s a question that only you can answer for yourself. This is the Apostle Pauls take on this whole winner: loser thing though that we’re remembering today on Good Friday. He says:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

This is Philippians chapter 3:

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus who though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something he should exploit. Instead he emptied himself taking the form of a slave being born in human likeness and being found in human form he humbled himself, he became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”

“And so God exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in the heaven and on earth and under the earth and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father.”

See the Bibles take; Gods take on Easter is that He loves us so much that Jesus was prepared to step down out of heaven to become a man, to pour out His life, His very life blood on that brutal cross for you and me. So then instead of me being punished for my sin and you being punished for yours Jesus takes the fall so that you and I can stand tall forever.

And by that I don’t mean standing tall in pride, I mean standing tall in the knowledge of the utterly amazing grace that God poured out on you and me on that cross. Hey that’s the message of Easter, it’s about grace, it’s about forgiveness, it’s about a rock solid security in knowing beyond any shadow of any doubt that God loves you and God loves me.

So have a happy Easter.

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