The truth of all this holds not just for tangible goods, but for most anything imaginable that could potentially enhance human well-being. As Roger Arnold has noted in his text Microeconomics,
[A] good is anything from which individuals receive utility or satisfaction. In everyday conversations, the word good usally applies to something tangible that is bought or sold in a market. But there are more goods in the world than just the tangible items sold in markets. Friendship and love are both goods, although neither is tangible and neither is bought and sold in a market...
What about the Christian life, or as some have called it, "the good life"? Clearly a majority of people, in America at least, consider being a Christian somewhat valuable. With various levels of zeal we support Christian causes, read Christian books, attend Christian churches, defend Christian causes. Professing Christians are everywhere you look. At the same time, skeptics and critics point out that in behavioral terms Christians are scarcely distinguishable from anyone else: Indeed, statistically we are no less likely than anyone else to have children out of wedlock, get caught in a financial scandal, or commit a violent crime.
Why the inconsistency? Perhaps economics can provide some insight. If the church is experiencing non-stop numerical growth with little spiritual growth to show for it, the problem may have to do with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to contemptuously as "cheap grace." That is, the advertised price for following Christ is simply too low and consequently everyone wants in on the deal. But the Christian life is not cheap. It cost the Son of God an agonizing death to provide us access to eternal life and communion with himself, who warned that each of his disciples would have to "take up his cross" in order to follow him. It should not suprise us, then, that Jesus compared the life of discipleship to a costly all-out war or an expensive long-term building project, and then urged us to "count the cost" before presuming to be his disciples:
"So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:33).
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