The Value of Work

This morning I felt really pleased with myself because I had managed to change an electric socket (I’m no handyman). Perhaps I felt even better when I switched on the radio in time to listen to Any Questions.

Imagine my amazement when Leanne Wood, the leader of the Welsh political party Plaid Cymru, talked about a school in Wales that had been built using a Private Funding Initiative (PFI). These are hugely controversial because the contractors who help fund the projects often demand to have a monopoly on maintaining the buildings. This means that they can virtually charge what they like for repairs. In the case of this school they asked for £2500 – to change an electric socket!

I mused about my morning’s activity. It was a job I had put off for months, anxious as I was about the hazards of working with anything electrical and unsure that I could carry it out with any competence. There were many false starts and anxious moments before I completed the wiring, put the socket together again, reconnected the power and tried an appliance on it to see whether it worked. It did. But never in my wildest dreams did I imagine, when I paid £1.29 for a new socket and gave my labour free of charge, that my anxious toil would be worth a four-figure sum of money in the setting of that school. Perhaps I should retrain as an electrician …

There are many circumstances where one person sees more value in a thing than another might do. Estate agents will tend to advise you that a property is worth no more and no less than what someone else is prepared to pay for it – there is no authorised scale of values for such things. And … what about the human soul?

O teach me what it meaneth,

that cross uplifted high,

with One, the Man of Sorrows,

condemned to bleed and die!

O teach me what it cost Thee

to make a sinner whole;

and teach me, Saviour, teach me

the value of a soul!

Lucy Ann Bennett, 1850-1927

Yet, for the man or woman in the street in the secular and materialistic Britain of today, the going rate for the human soul is low and the call for a saviour of souls non-existent. Yet Jesus thought it worth His while to give up His life for sinful souls. Not only that, He also gave up 30 years of the enjoyment of His eternal glory with God His Father, which is a massive enough sacrifice in itself.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. Matthew 10:29-31 ESV

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Philippians 2:5-8

Many people are literally dying today for lack of self-worth. Do you recognise how valuable you are to the Saviour? Will you respond to His valuation of you?