Seeing things for what they're worth

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field (Matthew 13:44).

Uncle Carl had died a bachelor, so it fell to nephew Jeff to dispose of his uncles’ estate. Jeff dreaded the task because Uncle Carl was a notorious pack rat. Sure enough, the old house was stuffed to the gills with all sorts of odds and ends. Sadly, nothing looked all that valuable, so Jeff did not waste money on an auctioneer—he put together a series of garage sales on his own.

One of the sales featured a box filled with old comic books. Jeff never had any interested in comics; he recognized a couple of names like Superman and Captain America, but that was about it. Finding this box surprised him—with no children in the house, why had Uncle Carl kept these worthless old things? So Jeff marked the contents of the box at 25 cents per issue.

The morning of the sale, a well-dressed man in his thirties started thumbing through the box of comics. At one point he stopped and gasped, his eyes wide in surprise. He looked at one comic very carefully, then continued going through rest of the box much more slowly. Eventually he brought six issues over to Jeff and asked somewhat nervously, "every comic is really 25 cents?" Jeff nodded with some annoyance—what on earth was a grown man doing looking at comic books, he thought. The stranger handed over a buck fifty and scooted off to his car, chuckling as he went. Jeff had no idea that during WWII the government urged everyone to recycle paper; as a result, the few comic books that survived were now worth a great deal of money. If he had known something about old comics, he would have never let the man walk off with six prize collectibles worth over ten thousand dollars!

If you don’t understand what you have, you won’t appreciate its worth. This is especially true of the Bible. Bibles are all over the place; sadly, many of them collect dust instead of fingerprints. The Bible is God’s message sent to you—the words inside make it the most valuable book ever written! The Bible reveals how God frees us from unhappiness and grief through His Son Jesus Christ. The word of God offers direction to the lost and strength to the suffering. Nothing else in your possession can approach that kind of worth. Read God’s Book, and treasure it for being the valuable thing that it is.