MAKE-BELIEVE OR REALITY?
When I was in the seventh grade, I received a board game for baseball. I made up a complete league of 8 teams of 15 players each. As I played the board game, I kept up with the batting average and win/loss record for every player. It was a fascinating experience, but it wasn’t the real world.
When I look around today, I see a lot of people still playing make-believe games. Recently, things have gone to a new level utilizing Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) which enable the virtual world to allow competition. If you register your purchases on block-chain platforms, you have nothing to show except the original code of historical video moments and other creations. Some of the NFTs sell for thousands of dollars.
I read recently where a small statue sold for five thousand dollars. It didn’t really exist, but somebody bought it. It would be interesting to see how that person picked up what doesn’t exist in order to take it home!
One interesting craze today is digital horse-racing. You don’t have real horses. There is a platform called Zed Run where you can buy, sell, race, and breed digital horses. The horses are merely lines of code that are made to look like horses on the screen. They are easier to handle than real horses because you don’t have to give them food or water, they never get tired, and there is no limit to the number of times that they can run.
The folks that create these digital horses claim that each horse has its own bloodline and pre-programmed qualities and defects. The “stud farm,” run by Zed Run, allows you to “breed” the digital horses. Each digital horse is unique by use of its algorithms. You can pay from $125 to $45,000 for a horse. One recently sold for $125,000, and it is projected that in the future, a horse could sell for $1 million.
These races cost $100 to enter. Each 12-horse race gives cash prizes for the horses that place in the top three positions. But this isn’t the real world. It’s a way to spend your money and your time, but what difference does it make in life?
I tell you what is real – life. Life will end with my last breath, but because of God’s grace and the fact that His son Jesus conquered death, I have an opportunity to live forever in heaven. And heaven is real. I have a lot of friends with whom I am looking forward to spending eternity with!
The Christian faith is not an NFT – it is a FSR – For Sure Reality. It has made the difference in my life here on earth. Before I became a Christian, I had a lot of things in life that were make-believe. When I surrendered to Jesus, my life changed completely. The real world is the place to live, and I look forward to eternity where there will be even “more real.” Jesus offers the abundant life now and for eternity (John 10:11) to you and everybody who will receive it!
The way to win in life is to win the real and most important race. Paul shares how to win in I Corinthians 9:24-27. Do what he says, and you can be the real winner!!
