Daily Devotionals

Chip Shots from the Ruff of Life

Devotional: December 23rd

I have always been fascinated by the values that are placed on collectibles. I am even more fascinated by the people who determine those values. Who are they? Is that their only job? Think about it for a moment. You have a collectible item and you buy a book to find out what it is worth. Funny thing is, it is only worth that if that is what you can actually get out of it. That's the nudge on collectibles. You pay the worth at a store, but can you turn around and sell it to someone for what you just paid?

Years ago I collected ball cards with my sons. We mostly collected baseball cards but there were a few football and even basketball cards in there somewhere. However, the hot property was the baseball cards. We would buy boxes of cards and then sort through them to see if we got just one that made it all worthwhile. Here's the frightening thing about those cards. The ones called "commons" (i.e. not the stars) were worth a cool quarter of a cent. That's $.0025 for those of you who need to visualize it.

Meanwhile the stars' cards were set at a much higher value. The values were also determined by the amount of prints of a particular card set as well as the condition of the card. If a card company over produced one particular year those cards were lower in value to the point that a full set of card for a year could conceivably be lower than the retail price of the set if purchased separately. Again, that value is meaningless if nobody will pay that amount for it.

Enter God. When He created the world He looked at everything He did and he gave it a value. He said, "It's good." But that was His perfect creation. How could it be bad? Ah, but one part of the creation, Man, got so bad that God was ashamed of His work and He destroyed the world. He has since taken a long hard look at Man and has placed a value on Man that could only be paid by God Himself. That price?

"For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:6-8 Even though we are common and continually overproduce year after year and our condition is admittedly less than even mediocre many times, God placed the value of His only begotten Son on our souls and reached out to purchase us from the world's scrapheap.