To Encourage You

1 Peter 2:4 “You come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious”

You’ve heard the saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  It’s the idea that it is the person that decides what is beautiful to him or her, with beauty not necessarily inherent to the object in and of itself.  And so a male warthog will see something in a female warthog that you and I don’t necessarily see!  Interestingly, it is things that we find “beautiful” in one way or another that we tend to place value upon. Pearls are like that. We value them because we find beauty in them.  But the biblical quote, “don’t throw your pearls before swine” is meant to teach us, again, that not everyone sees value in the same things.  

I just read an article today about a person who bought a house in Michigan some years ago and the man who sold him the house gave him a rock which he thought was a meteorite. As such, it was interesting, but of no real value to the seller of the house. The buyer later used the rock as a doorstop, that is, until he took the rock to be examined by a professor of geology at Central Michigan University.  It was at that time that he found his rock was an extremely rare and valuable type of meteorite and was likely worth around $100,000.  This rock that the seller had, in essence, rejected, was found to be precious indeed when looked at with the right set of eyes. 

This story reminded me of the words above from 1 Peter 2 which likens Jesus to a stone.  Like the stone in the story just mentioned, Jesus was a person that the world, by and large, rejected, when he came into the world that first Christmas.   The vast majority saw very little that was good in Him. The religious leaders actually said He was of the devil.  Because Jesus challenged these leaders’ hold on power and money, they saw Him as nothing more than a threat. Most of the people decided to follow their lead, especially when they saw that their hope that Jesus would become an earthly king who would bring them great earthly benefits was just not going to happen. They saw Him only through worldly, human eyes, and to those eyes He was worthless.  But how wrong they were! 

You see, in God the Father’s eyes, the One Who defines true worth, Jesus was “chosen and precious.”  He was chosen because He was the only One through Whom God could free the world from the sin that had blinded them in such darkness.  As such, He is the most precious One Who has ever existed, not just in terms of God’s view point, but also in His value to both you and me.  Here before those to whom He came stood the light of the world, yet in Him they could see no light at all.  Here stood One, the Only One in the history of man Who was “without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19), yet they couldn’t see it for the beam that was in their own eyes (Matthew 7:5).  

So, how do you see Him? And as you consider what you are looking at, do you trust your sense of sight? You see, Jesus, to the God of the universe, is a most precious Stone.  But if that’s not what you see when you look at Him, I would suggest the problem is in the eye of the beholder only, and not in the One you see.