Profit and Loss—Dangers of a Balanced Budget!

A Sabbath Devotional

By Sylvan Lashley

University of the Southern Caribbean

Mark 8:36 - "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

         We are caught up in the enigma of profit and loss in financial and business affairs.  Countless financial statements are produced all hoping to show that there is more profit than loss.  Likewise, we are caught up in life’s affairs, in the work of doing and being, of eking out a meaningful existence in trying economic times.  Life for some has become a zero-based sum game where the profit made equals the loss that you incur, so that in a two-player encounter, one player’s gain is another player’s loss, the social and economic result being zero.  Reduced to one player only playing against himself, we are engaged in a zero-based life struggle—we balance budgets, and appear to gain as much as we lose.  Yet, it is not enough to balance a budget, for balancing a budget, while noteworthy, in the larger sphere of life, leaves us with a zero sum.   At the point of zero sum, the risk is 50-50 and the strategic value becomes most important since balance approximates a condition of static equilibrium.

         It is now that Mark 8:36 begins to make sense for even if a man gains the entire world in perfect balance; he is still at the zero sum, because he has lost his soul.  In his famous sermon no. 92 of July 6, 1856, the noted Charles Spurgeon expounded on the text further.  Alexander the Great gained the power of empires, Croesus gained the wealth of riches, and Solomon gained the trappings of great wisdom. Says the poet quoted in Spurgeon, "if thou art rich, thou art poor, for like an ass, whose back with ingots bows, thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, and death unloads thee…give me neither poverty nor riches." But to lose the soul suggests an incalculable and unrecoverable loss, for it is a gift from the Maker, lent to us for a time, of intrinsic value and great capabilities (Spurgeon, 1856) to be returned to the Maker. 

         At the University of the Southern Caribbean, we go beyond balanced budgets of zero-sums to the strategic value of the soul, to the value of life beyond the grave. The pomp of circumstance, the power and position, the glitter of academic prowess and the ease of luxury pale into comparison, for what shall it profit a man if he gains the entire world and in the end, loses his own soul. A fearsome reality awaits us, for the good that we do may matter little, if it does little for the world around us. The Christian is called to avoid the dangers of a balanced budget, to think outside of the box, to throw the box away.