What Are You Actually Buying?

Somebody told a young sales guy early in his career: if you want to close deals, go buy the most expensive suit you can’t afford and strap on a Rolex. Walk into any room looking the part and people will assume the rest.

There’s something almost right about that advice. And something completely rotten at its core.

The almost-right part: we all want to look presentable, we care about quality, and we want our homes to feel warm and our cars to feel like ours. Those aren’t corrupt desires — they’re human ones. Good desires become a problem when they start doing a different job than the one they were hired for.

Randy Alcorn writes that wealth is like the sun — not neutral, drawing everything toward it. Get too close and you burn; go too far and you freeze. There’s an orbit, a right relationship, where you can enjoy the good things God has given you without losing yourself to the gravitational pull. Most people don’t think about the orbit — they just drift.

The real question, when I make a purchase, is what I’m actually trying to accomplish.

“Is this a sin?” is too blunt an instrument. The more uncomfortable diagnostic: is this decision primarily about sustaining myself and the people I’m responsible for, or about elevating how I appear to the people around me? Those two motivations can wear the same clothes from the outside, but they don’t feel the same from the inside — sustaining doesn’t need an audience, elevating always does.

The iconography problem is real. A used Mercedes is still a Mercedes. A Tesla is still a Tesla. It doesn’t matter what you paid for it — the person driving behind you in a 2012 Honda doesn’t know what you paid, and wouldn’t care if they did. What they see is the logo. And the logo communicates something whether you intend it to or not. That’s why knockoff brands exist — the whole appeal is that you can look like the thing without actually being it, which tells you something about what we’ve decided the logo is really for.

If I want this car to look a certain way, I should be honest with myself about whether that matters because it genuinely matters to me, or because of who I think it makes me look like. Knowing what you’re trading before you trade it is the whole exercise.

There’s a man in Matthew 13 who stumbles onto treasure buried in a field. He goes and sells everything he has — and he does it in joy. Not duty. Not guilt. Not reluctant obedience. Joy. Because he knew what he was trading up for.

That’s the picture. There’s a freer, lighter, more joyful way to move through the world than one organized around what people think when they see you pull into the parking lot — and it starts with noticing what you’re actually buying when you buy something.

The aim, as Paul puts it, is love from a pure heart — a harder question than “is this purchase too expensive?” but the right one.