Have you ever wondered if you can put a dollar value on life?

This question comes to life when you need to spend money to stay alive: treatments, medications, experimental drugs, and robotic devices.

How much would you spend? How much is 12 extra months of life worth?  $25,000.00; $250,000.00 or $2,500,000.00?

Disease, especially terminal illness, puts life on the scales and you are required to try and find the balance. Disease can require you to give life a dollar value.

In trying to find the balance, I’ve had to lean on my faith.

What I know to be true is that there is a difference between putting value on life and accepting the value that has already been established for me.

My personal significance and self worth is not based on what I might pay for extra days, but instead it is grounded in the amazing sacrifice and love of God for me that lasts for eternity.

God established how much life is worth by giving His all. When the disease of mankind, sin, separated man from God and asked God how much are we, humanity, worth to Him? His answer was “all of Me”!

Galatians 2:20 says that the life I live now is a life of faith established on the reality that Jesus gave Himself for me and He did it because of His love for me.

Money doesn’t and couldn’t begin to put a value on my life, Jesus has already done it by loving me and giving Himself for me.

In the same way, when we love people, when we give ourselves to them, we establish their value to us.  We affirm that they are significant and of great value.

How much do we spend to live?  How much do we spend to save those dying of hunger and thirst, without access to medications in third world countries?

If we take Christ’s example, then I guess it’s all of us: whatever we can and whatever it takes.

We do what we can when we can and as fast as we can. 

This is the nature of God to love life, value life and save lives. Our actions are motivated out of love for others, not at their expense. We live for their value, not our own.

Remember today that when humanity’s shortcomings put the ask on God to give us a value for humanity, to show us what we were worth, He established our value and worth once and for all, His life for ours, and that’s more than enough.

Phil