Chase Bank has a new adversing campaign for its Sapphire credit card. You can watch both the "Holiday Flying" and "Bones" commercials here. The commercials are obviously a spoof of people who should be interested or amazed by one thing (A vacation with Chevy Chase or the discovery of a dinosaur bone) but instead are amazed by something trivial (using airline miles). We all get a smile out of these misdirected folks while at the same time getting the point of the commercial. As I watched these commercials I realized something: we often live exactly like these misdirected folks. We focus our lives on the trivial while ignoring the important--and like the people in the commercial we don't even realize how misdirected we are. In 1 Timothy 4.7-9 we find just one example of this. Paul writes, "Rather train yourself for godliness; 8 for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 9 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance." Paul tells us that a well-directed life pursues godliness as of first importance, bodily training is a good thing, but at best it is of secondary importance. We flip these two things around focusing much time and effort on bodily training and far less on pursuing godliness--and we think we've got it right, like people who think airline miles are more important than an amazing discovery of a dinosaur bone.
