Topic : Fear, of loss
Reward Vs. Risk
You’ve been given a free ticket to a football game. A snowstorm the night before makes the drive to the stadium risky. Would you go? Okay: same game, same snowstorm—except this time you paid $100 for the ticket. Now would you go? According to University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, people are more likely to take a risk if they paid for the ticket. But, as Thaler points out, “The fact that you spent $100 shouldn’t matter when you decide between the reward of seeing the game and the risk of getting killed.” Two all-too human tendencies come into play here. the first is the “sunk-cost fallacy”—the idea that having paid for something, you had better not waste it, no matter what the consequences. The second is “loss aversion”—the fact that people place about twice as much significance on a loss as on a gain. In other words, they are twice as unhappy about losing $100 as they are pleased about making $100.
Quotes
- The continual awareness that God is watching and weighing every one of my thoughts, words, actions and attitudes. - Prov. 9:10
- We fear men so much because we fear God so little. - William Gurnall
The Executioner
One time many years ago, the king of Hungary found himself depressed and unhappy. He sent for his brother, a good-natured but rather indifferent prince. The king said to him, “I am a great sinner; I fear to meet God.” But the prince only laughed at him. This didn’t help the king’s disposition any. Though he was a believer, the king had gotten a glimpse of his guilt for the way he’d been living lately, and he seriously wanted help.
In those days it was customary if the executioner sounded a trumpet before a man’s door at any hour, it was a signal that he was to be led to his execution. The king sent the executioner in the dead of night to sound the fateful blast at his brother’s door. The prince realized with horror what was happening. Quickly dressing, he stepped to the door and was seized by the executioner, and dragged pale and trembling into the king’s presence. In an agony of terror he fell on his knees before his brother and begged to know how he had offended him.
“My brother,” answered the king, “if the sight of a human executioner is so terrible to you, shall not I, having grievously offended God, fear to be brought before the judgment seat of Christ?”
Teddy Roosevelt
David McCullough in his book MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK tells this story about young Teddy Roosevelt:
“Mittie (his mother) had found he was so afraid of the Madison Square Church that he refused to set foot inside if alone. He was terrified, she discovered, of something called the ‘zeal.’ It was crouched in the dark corners of the church ready to jump at him, he said. When she asked what a zeal might be, he said he was not sure, but thought it was probably a large animal like an alligator or a dragon. He had heard the minister read about if from the Bible. Using a concordance, she read him those passages containing the word ZEAL until suddenly, very excited, he told her to stop. The line was from the Book of John, 2:17: ‘And his disciples remembered that it was written, ‘The ZEAL of thine house hath eaten me up”’”
People are still justifiably afraid to come near the “zeal” of the Lord, for they are perfectly aware it could “eat them up” if they aren’t one of His. Our Lord is good, but He isn’t safe.
