OK, imagine you are watching a stand-up comic and he gives the old line, “My friend is soooo worthless…”  And of course the crowd responds in their monotone shout, “HOW - WORTH-LESS - IS - HE?”  And then the comic comes back with something like, “My friend is so worthless, he has to pay his boss to go to work.”  Or, “He joined the Army and they traded him to Mexico for some magic beans.”  Ok, can you think of a better one?

I like to wonder about Jesus, as you can see from some of my previous posts, Do You Ever Wonder? and More Wondering.  I wonder how Jesus would do as a stand up comic.  Would He be funny?  I would guess he could be funny if He wanted to.  Actually, I think He would be very funny.  Some people may not realize it, but He said some pretty funny things.  He actually was the first ever to come up with an answer to the question above.  In Luke 14, Jesus was talking to a large crowd, and He was telling them about the costs of being His disciple.  He tells of a couple examples about considering the costs before deciding to commit oneself to something.  Then, in the last verse, he suggests that a person who begins the discipleship journey, but does not follow through with actually becoming a disciple is as worthless as salt that has lost its flavor.  Jesus ponders if the salt can be made salty again.  Then he answers His own question in the negative, and says that flavorless salt is not fit for the soil, nor is it fit for the manure pile.  So putting this into a way we can understand it, lets say you consider yourself a Christian, but have not followed Jesus in becoming His disciple.  And let’s imagine Jesus had a pile of manure.  And if you were to step in the pile of manure, Jesus would say, “Hey dude, get out of that.  You are messing up my pile of CRAP!”  So his answer to the earlier mentioned question would be, “This guy is so worthless, he would ruin my pile of crap.”

Yikes.  How many people that claim to be Christians do you think are messing up Jesus’ crap piles?  Sadly, probably a lot.  I sure hope I’m not one of them.  I pray that I would be a useful addition to Jesus’ pile of crap.