What’s Your Price?

By Grant Gaines

A business man was sitting next to a pretty woman on a long redeye flight back to his hometown. After the basic, “What’s your name? Where are you from? And what do you do?” get-to-know-you questions, the man out of the blue directly looked at his new friend and asked, “How much money would it cost for you to have sex with me right now?”

The woman was stunned at the audacity of the question and immediately refused this crude offer. However, the man pulled out his checkbook and began scribbling on a check then showed it to the woman. “How about for $500,000?” the man grinned as her looked into his seatmate’s eyes.

The woman squirmed for a moment but finally agreed to the man’s offer.

The man pulled the check back and began to scribble once again then showed the woman the new check which now had a monetary value of $100,000. The woman was a bit confused at what the man was doing but said she would still accept the money as a payment for her sex. But as he had done before, rather than giving the woman the check, he pulled back his checkbook and wrote a new check that read “$5.00.”

“Look sir,” exclaimed the woman, “I don’t know what type of woman you think I am, but I am NOT sleeping with you for $5.00!”

The man looked at her with a smile and responded, “Oh, I already know what type of woman you are. I’m just trying to find your price!”

The story above may simply be a fable, but I think it carries a powerful message – if you can put a price on your integrity, you don’t have any. Husbands and wives, if someone offer you any amount of money-even all the money in the world-to cheat on your spouse and you accept the offer, you don’t truly have integrity or an unwavering love for your spouse. Businessmen and students, if someone could pay you any amount of money to take a shortcut on a business proposal or class presentation and you accept it, you don’t really have integrity.

Integrity is doing the right thing no matter what the circumstances or costs are. It’s holding onto your convictions when everything seems to be pulling you the other way. As Plasms 15:4 (NIV) puts it, integrity could be defined as, “…keeping an oath even when it hurts….”

At the end of the day as Christians we don’t put a price on our integrity because we are simply following the example of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. At the onset of His ministry, “…the devil took [Jesus] to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give You,’ [Satan] said, ‘if You will bow down and worship me'” (Matthew 4:8-9, NIV). Satan wasn’t just offering Christ money, he was offering Him a monarchy. Satan didn’t offer Jesus all the money in the world, he offered Him the entire world itself.

But praise be to God that Jesus didn’t accept Satan’s offer. And while it may have been tempting to become a King without the cross, Jesus knew that there was never a price high enough to make Him forsake the opportunity to win us back from our sinful state. He willingly took a painful walk up a hill to die a brutal death so we could walk away in freedom.

Do you have a price?

“A good name is more desirable than great riches;

to be esteemed is better than silver or gold.”

– Proverbs 22:1 (NIV)