The Value of Our Souls

By: Will Savell

Several years ago, I was at my grandmother’s house in the small town of Philadelphia, MS, looking through a pile of my mother’s childhood memories. Unknown to my brother or me, my mom had collected some baseball cards.

My eyes became huge when I saw the name Mickey Mantle on one of the cards. I didn’t know much about baseball, but I knew that any Mickey Mantle card carried a high value. In fact, after some research I had found that this particular card was valued at around $5,000. Imagine finding five grand lying in your closet. That’s how I felt.

When I excitedly picked it up out of the pile, along with it came three other cards and a piece of plain white paper. For whatever reason, my mother thought it was a good idea to organize her baseball cards by gluing them all to pieces of paper!

Now, if you don’t know, the value of the card depends on both the front and the back of the card being in tact. I didn’t know what to do. I just yelled, “Mom! What were you thinking?!”

She explained, “They’re just cards with pictures on them. They were my toys. They didn’t really have any value to me.”

Some of the guys reading this realize how bad this actually was. It was really bad because that card is so valuable.

However, there’s something with much more value than that. It’s your soul. And because we aren’t in the business of killing the sin in our lives, it’s as if we have thrown glue all over it and stuck it to a piece of paper, completely neglecting its real value.

Paul writes in Romans 8:13, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”

Our souls hold a much higher value than any baseball card ever could. Therefore, by power of the Holy Spirit, we must put to death the sin that we battle on a daily basis. If we don’t, it will choke the very life out of the faith, love, and passion for Christ that we depend on.

As family pressures rise, as the economy continues to spiral, and as children disappoint, we need the faith to believe that there’s going to be a better day. As the world is so full of hate, we need Christ’s love to endure. And as the devil seems to have his way, we need a strong passion for Christ to be a light in this dark world.

We need those graces of faith, love, and passion for Christ. They are good for our souls, but sin has a way of hindering their growth in our life. By the power of the Spirit, let us value our souls more than any other earthly thing and put to death the sins of the flesh.