The story is told of George Bernard Shaw that he was once seated beside a Duchess at a dinner party. In the course of their conversation, he asked: "Tell me, Duchess, would you live with a man for a million pounds?" "Well," replied the Duchess, "I suppose I would" Then Shaw asked her: "Would you live with a man for five pounds?" The Duchess was insuited: "What do you think I am?" "We’ve already established that," said Shaw, "now we are just determining the price."

Long before the coming of Christ, the pagan philosophers decided that the process of growing, maturing, learning, developing character and living was, essentially, the process of establishing values - getting the proper price tags on everything in life. In simple terms, making value judgments. Certainly Jesus Christ confirmed their convictions. When our Lord asks us the rhetorical question: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Or "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" He’s asking for a value judgment. And, for the materialist, you see, it’s going to be quite a question. When He asks: "Isn’t the life worth more than the food? Isn’t the body worth more than the clothing?" - again, He is thrusting the question of values at us. And when He states unequivocally: "My kingdom is like a priceless jewel for which a man will sell everything else that he might possess it," He is setting a price himself. He is putting first things first in our scale of values.

After Christmas, Easter, and all the other holidays, our stores usually have sales. I saw a store one time in Chicago that was so exclusive and expensive that they were much too dignified to admit that they had anything so common and bourgeois as a sale. A small, neatly lettered card in the window announced that they had "Post-Season Price Adjustments." I thought about the fact that that’s what the coming of Christ, His ministry, death and resurrection always causes us to do. We have to make some price adjustments. We have to rearrange our values.

We should remember that people are not born petty, nor do they have pettiness thrust upon them. They develop petty natures because their lives are occupied with petty things. One time one of the teachers in our Wednesday School interrupted my Confirmation Class to inform me of the tragedy that the girls’ toilet on the second floor was clogged up. Apparently, that earth-shaking fact was of more importance than the Word of Truth I was trying to give to my class.

Another time, a lady visitor to Church told me after the first Service that she had lost one of her earrings and asked if I couldn’t make the announcement at the second Service and have the congregation look around for it. That tells you quite a lot about a person, doesn’t it? There are many persons who live their lives on just that level of pettiness.

We are all acquainted with the process of making mountains out of molehills. We need to remember that, equally tragic, is the process of making molehills out of mountains. Real living demands selectivity. There are just so many things that we can do in a lifetime. We can spend our time reading tabloids or classics - we can’t do both. We can listen to either the sap or the sage - not both. We can see just so many things, either the cheap and the gaudy and the tawdry, or you can catch a vision of the beautiful, the excellent and the eternal.

Dean Briggs of Harvard tells of taking a group of college students on a trip to Rome. Within walking distance of their hotel was the Colosseum, the Forum, the great museums of art, the Vatican Library and St. Peter’s Basilica, and they spent their day playing bridge and drinking in the hotel lobby. Too many of us in life are like a city bus that stops at every corner and takes on passengers, until the bus is so full that all the important stops must be eliminated. We have no time for mountains; life is too full of molehills.

Day in, day out, in the normal course of events, we are called upon to decide: What is a mountain? What is a molehill? What is a peak? What is a promontory? What is a pimple? As our lives become more complicated, more diverse, more various, the choices are more numerous and, indeed, more difficult. Let’s take some of the things upon which we have been building a Federal case and hold them up to the light of eternal dimensions and see if they are worth it. All right, what is on the way to giving you your ulcer, as someone has called it, "the wound stripe of civilization?" What’s eating you? And is it worth it? Perhaps it’s time that we check a few price tags.

How guilty we feel when our Lord delivers a simple command to us: "Don’t be anxious." How many of us can obey that command? Don’t go batting around crying: "What shall we eat? What shall we wear?" When you do that, our Lord tells us, you’re acting like a bunch of pagans! Your Heavenly Father knows that you have need of these things. And that, beloved, is the essence of what our Lord has to say to us in the Sermon on the Mount. If we are convinced of the truth of that, then we should get our lives out of the realm of pettiness and place them in ther eternal category where they belong.

I suspect that one way we can get that eternal dimension in life is to recognize that there’s nothing new in the problems or choices we have to face, as, for instance, in our battle for health and strength. It has become such a tremendous portion of our lives - maintaining health. We’ve become, virtually a nation of hypochondriacs.

Strickland Gilliams’ brief poem about man’s infirmities is titled "The Antiquity of the Microbes," and it says just about everything on the subject of microbes that needs to be said: "Adam had ‘em." That covers the subject, doesn’t it?

Why all of the anxiety about holding the carcass together and keeping it operating in top form? And this is true of every phase of life. A housewife complained to me just this past week: "I’ve just got more to do than one person can do." Just so. That’s one of the principles in life. We have to come to terms with it. There is always more to be done than any of us can do, more words to be spoken, more books to be read, more errands to be run, more jobs to be completed, more blows to be struck. And it is true that whatever good has been wrought in this world is often accomplished by people who were nervous, frustrated, not seeing eye to eye with their neighbors, hampered by bad stomachs, vengeful gall bladders or aching heads. "Adam had ‘em."

We will never be completely free of anxiety. There is too much unfinished business in this world. Struggle, perplexity, even defeat are the inescapable aspects of human life. We have to come to terms with it. We tear ourselves to pieces when we add to our anxiety the fact that our anxiety becomes another reason for anxiety. The first step in the control of all this anxiety is to place a lot of things in the category of things that can’t be changed. We mark them as a brick wall and stop beating our heads against them. In the words of the old and familiar prayer: "Lord, grant me the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the serenity to accept the things that can’t be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference." Now, there’s the rub, isn’t it? - wisdom to know the difference. In other words, after the seventh muddy-footed child has walked in and dirtied the kitchen floor for the seventh time, and you’ve wiped it up for the seventh time, you come to terms with the fact that maybe a bit of soiled vinyl tile is one of the inevitabilities of life, and you don’t go on breaking your back or blowing your top. You stop being anxious about the inevitables. You have to remember that there were times that our Lord gave up, and He told us to.

Another cause of our anxieties, our frustrations, our fretfulness, is our tendency, many of us, to choose the wrong roads, to climb the wrong hills, seek the wrong goals. I remember that one summer when I was a lad, my father was driving us through the Black Hills. We took a little by-road that we thought would be a short-cut to where we were going. We wound up through the hills for some distance on that little, one-lane track, and, finally, the road suddenly ended. That was it. It didn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t even turn around. We had to back down the whole way we had come. How many of us are on that kind of a road in life. So much of our time is spent in nurturing our self-esteem, our struggle for places of preference, our godless chasing of the Joneses, the feverish clamor for all the symbols of security, money, clothing, imposing homes. Come on, children, they’re dead ends! They’re dead ends! And in our secret heart of hearts, we know it. We’re on the wrong roads. They don’t take us where we want to go.

I wonder when we will get this one eternal fact crowded into our craniums. We were made to live as children of God, loving and serving Him, and, because of our love for Him, serving our fellow men. We were meant to lose our lives in order to find them, and when we live like that, WE ARE THE REAL THING! And when we live as greedy, grasping, seeking, clawing, climbing, killing animals, WE ARE IMPOSTERS! We are leading lives that weren’t meant for us, and we are bound to end up in a dead end. You know, the coming of Christ, His ministry, death and resurrection, remind us that we might as well stop being imposters, something or someone we are not.

Jeremy Taylor once wrote: "Death is midnight when all men must unmask." That’s one of the principles of living eternal life, as Christians should be. We think we can judge a person just by looking at him. At best, we can only guess. But in eternal life, there is no guessing. We will know! Only the good will be good looking. Selfishness will look just as rotten and futile as it is. Cruelty, greed, egotism will all be exposed to the light of day. You know, after death, there are going to be a lot of surprises, aren’t there? How do you think you’ll feel when you take off your mask?

In her book, Gift from the Sea, Anne Lindberg writes: "The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere." That’s why social life is so tiring. One is forever wearing a mask. That’s what’s wonderful about living in the light of Christ, with eternal dimensions and lasting values. We can be exactly what we are - children of God. Yes, dirty children, soiled children, spoiled children, but, nevertheless, children of God. What a relief that is!

And, finally, we need to remember that the abundant life depends not on the quantity of our activities, but on the quality. We don’t need to READ everything in order to be educated. We don’t need to KNOW everything in order to be wise. We don’t need to HAVE everything in order to be happy. We don’t need to DO everything in order to have a fulfilling life. Too many friends make us less a part of society than more a part of it. We must all learn the lesson that every man must know: "Having one woman completely, he has all women, but seeking to have all women, he has none." That’s true of every facet of life. Seek to have it all, and you will end up empty-handed. So much of our anxiety is merely seeking too much.

You remember the old story about the Quaker who erected a sign on one of his properties: "I will give this property free to any man who is completely satisfied with life." Finally a man stopped and asked for the property. The old Quaker asked: "Art thou completely satisfied with thy lot in life?" "Absolutely," answered the man. The Quaker said: "Why, then, dost thou want my lot?" We give ourselves away, always, that we are seeking for something. So much of our frustration and anxiety comes from trying to pack into a life more than it will hold. We try to make some things more important than they really are. We need to make a proper price adjustment and decide whether they are worth striving for.

I remember a friend of mine in another parish, who was one of those business fireballs of our day. He devoted himself intensely, feverishly, frantically, sacrificially to his work. He was determined by hook or crook, by tooth or claw, to get to the top. In the process, he lost most of his friends. He finally lost the respect and friendship of his children, and then he lost his wife in a divorce. Finally, after a severe coronary, he nearly lost his life. In the hospital, I tried to console him, because in his collapse, his business also collapsed. It was running on too fine an edge. I said: "I’m sorry that you have lost everything. I certainly feel for you." He said: "You know, Pastor, the sad part - the part that really hurts - is not losing it, it’s lying here and having to face the fact that it wasn’t worth it." Some time we are going to have to face that fact, and we’d better make the necessary price adjustments as we go along.

After all these things do the pagans seek. What shall it profit a man - what price tag will he put on it - if a man gain the world and lose his own soul?

What is your price tag? What will you give in exchange for your soul?