Let’s go back in time to 2009. Morace Park was trawling an internet auction site when he came across a battered looking film canister for sale. He thought it looked cool and bid for it. He won it for £3.20.
It arrived, looking just as battered as its picture online. He forgot about it for awhile and when he finally got around to it, he thought he’d take a look inside. It had an old reel of film in it. It turned out to be a stunning piece of history, a long lost 1916 Charlie Chaplin film.

 
 
 
 
Bought at  £3.20, valued at possibly more than £1000000.
 

Score for the buyer.

 

Oops for the seller.

The Roman Empire was on the move. It had stamped its authority near and far, including over the land of Israel. The locals there were not impressed.

The establishment there were also unimpressed with a Young Upstart hailing from a backwater town called Nazareth.

 
 
 
 
He was shaking up the status quo so it was time to sort Him out. And what better way to do it than by crushing Him between the expectations of the public and the authority of their foreign rulers?
 

So they devised a cunning question to do just that. They asked Him, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”
If He said “Yes”, the public would hate Him. If He said “No”, the rulers would crush Him.
Just Brilliant.

Or so they thought. What they didn’t count on was a more brilliant answer….

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why do you test Me, you hypocrites? Show Me the tax money.”

So they brought Him a denarius.

And He said to them, “Whose image and inscription is this?”

They said to Him, “Caesar’s.”

And He said to them, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Matthew 22:18-21

Something is valuable partly because of what it was made for. So to dig deeper into your worth, let’s ask that classic question: What’s the meaning of life?
(why tackle only simple questions?)
This profound question was leveled at Jesus more as a trap than an honest question (again).

 

 

That of course was no problem for Him. His tried and true insight was…

“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31

You are made up of heart, soul, mind and strength.

The heart speaks of your thoughts, your desires and your feelings. The soul speaks of the real you, that which is eternal and immortal, that which isn't merely physical. The mind speaks of your mental faculties, your deep thoughts, your understanding and your imagination. And finally your strength, your power or your physicality.

 

 

 

This is how you are designed. To be fully alive is to fully embrace life on all your levels of heart, soul, mind and strength. This includes your relationships, more on that later.
As you are made of all these dimensions, take the time to realise where you’re at physically, relationally, spiritually and professionally. Once you have insight into that, you are then able to work on becoming the fullness of all that God has planned for you to be.
That should be the aim of any phase in your life and you should be active in that now.