Good morning! One of the most fun jobs I ever had was working at a marina on the Jersey shore. The marina had a little of everything – a pool, restaurant, bait and tackle shop, fuel pump, and a sales office. I didn’t realize it until I started working there, but the marina life is serious. Most slips had a deck in front of it that people would set up cabanas on where they would spend most of every weekend in the summer months.
The job wasn’t always easy, but it did come with a few nice perks. Any time we completed work on a boat that affected the way it would handle in the water, we would take it our for a test ride. Additionally, we had model boats setup in certain slips that we could sometimes take out after hours if we wanted. There is nothing like being out on the water on a beautiful sunny day!
One day I was out on a jet ski when all of a sudden, my brand new sunglasses flew off my head and into the water. Now, these were no ordinary sunglasses, they were my nice sunglasses that I had just spent over a hundred dollars for! I circled back to the shallow water to search for my glasses; I must have been out there for over two hours trying to find those things. I was attempting to figure out the current to see where they may have drifted, and kept diving down to feel around.
At the end of the day, I did not find those things, they are long gone! I was determined to do everything I could to find them because they were so valuable to me! I knew I wasn’t going to go out and spend another hundred dollars anytime soon, so I wanted to do everything I could to find them!
Whenever I lose something valuable, I always go searching. I’m sure you do too! You try to back track your steps until you finally remember the last place you can remember having whatever was lost.
This made me think about how hard I will look for a pair of sunglasses, but how easy it was for me to forget to spend time seeking God each day. Here I was in the water (when I was supposed to be working) spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to find something that was lost, when in the end, I came up empty handed.
It made me examine my heart and question myself on how valuable my relationship with God was. Would I have been willing to spend the same amount of time searching God’s Word and communicating with Him in prayer to find the answer to something I didn’t understand about life? I hate to admit it, but at that time, the answer was a big NO.
“Look to the LORD and his strength; seek his face always.”
1 Chronicles 16:11
How valuable is your relationship with God? Do you always look to Him? Is your relationship with Him the most important thing in your life?
This little story about how important my sunglasses were to me at the time, remind me about how important I am to God ALL the time! Did you know that YOU are valuable to God?!
You are so valuable that He sent His Son, Jesus, to make a way for us to be reconciled to Him! Think about this, Jesus came to the earth to take our punishment upon Himself, so that we could live forever! WOW!
The Bible tells a parable about the lost sheep which tells us how valuable we are to God.
“What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them goes astray, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go out to search for the one that is lost? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices more over that one sheep than over the ninety-nine that did not go astray. In the same way, your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.”
Matthew 18:12-14
The truth is, we were all lost at one point in time. It’s not until we find Jesus, that we find LIFE! Jesus came to seek and save those who were lost. It doesn’t matter how good we think we are, we have all fallen short of God’s standard and are in need of a Savior.
Thankfully, we have a God that loves us so much that He would make a way for the relationship between Him and humanity to be restored. He is a God that leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one. This emphasizes how He desires to have a personal relationship with each one of us!
This morning I encourage you to look to God because He has been chasing after you!
Heavenly Father, thank You for reminding us today about how valuable we are to You! Thank You for being a personal God that cares so deeply about every single person on the face of the earth. You know everything there is to know about each one of us! Help us to find value in our relationship with You to the point that nothing would stop us from spending time with You every day! In Jesus Name – AMEN!
Be Transformed 