Unguarded Pot of Gold
I’m sure you’ve seen the footage. The 150 lb. guy lugging a 90 lb. pot of gold he found unguarded in back of an armored delivery truck. Obviously, the armored car company and the police have lost the whereabouts of the thief and the gold, or they would not have released the video. This happened back in September! With all the street surveillance in NYC, you’d think they could have followed him. But he’s disappeared with his loot.
All the news articles and comments I’ve read have focused on the thief. And he is a thief. No one should be applauding him or cheering him on.
But when I saw this, I kept thinking about something altogether different. What is a 90 lb. pot of gold, worth $1.6 million, sitting in the back of an open and unguarded truck? Did those guards have no sense of the value of what they were supposed to be guarding?
How do you not take better care of something so valuable?
That was exactly the point the author of Hebrews made when writing to dispersed Jews who were contemplating the Gospel of Jesus and the salvation he offered.
“How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” (Hebrews 2:3 ESV).
His emphasis was, “Do you know what you have here? Do you realize the value of this? The sacrifice made to get it to you? The eternal difference this will make in your life? How could you be so nonchalant about it?"
And that was the point of Jesus’ parable of the man who found a treasure in a field. He didn’t steal it, but sold everything he owned in order to buy the field where the treasure was located, because the value of that treasure exceeded everything that he had.
And that’s the value of the salvation God offers you. It far exceeds the value of EVERYTHING you have or could ever hope to have. It is worth trading EVERYTHING for. It is not something to be apathetic towards. An indifferent attitude towards the Gospel (that Jesus died for you and rose again) is far worse than leaving a pot of gold unguarded on the street.
But have you been doing that? Has your attitude been, “That’s cool. Jesus is cool. Now let me get on with my life."
“That’s cool. A pot of gold worth $1.6 million. Now let me get back to FaceBook on my phone” (or whatever foolish thing the guard was doing).
Does Jesus matter enough to you to give up everything in order to embrace him and follow him?
Or is he like a pot of gold sitting unguarded in the back of your truck?