Do you ever feel that your life is a mess? Do you try desperately to measure up to what you think you should be? Do you feel pressure to please others? Do you fear that you are not good enough?
A speaker once stood before a crowd of people, held up a hundred-dollar bill, and asked, “Who would like this bill?”
Hands shot up. He promised, “I am going to give this hundred-dollar bill to one of you but first let me do this.” He proceeded to crumple the bill. He then asked, “Who still wants it?”
All the hands went up. “Well,” he replied, “what if I do this?” He dropped the bill on the floor and smushed it beneath his shoe. He bent over, picked up the crumpled and dirty bill, and asked, “Now, who wants it?”
Still the hands went up. “My friends,” he said, “you have all learned a valuable lesson. No matter what I did to the money, you still wanted it because crumpling it up and scuffling it under my shoe did not decrease its value. It is still worth $100. Many times in our lives, we are dropped, crumpled, and ground into the dirt by the decisions we make or by the circumstances that come our way. We feel as though we are worthless. But no matter what has happened to you, or will happen to you, you will never lose your value in God’s eyes. To God, whether you are clean or dirty, finely creased or crumpled, you are still priceless to God.”
Simon Peter struggled with this after he denied knowing Jesus. He wept bitterly and concluded that he was a failure as a follower of Jesus.
Lloyd John Ogilvie comments, “Peter had built his whole relationship with Jesus Christ on his assumed capacity to be adequate. That’s why he took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self-generated assets of discipleship. The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: He believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord’s approval. Many of us face the same problem. We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. [We believe] he will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent. But we have turned the tables; we try to live so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.”
The truth is that God loves us deeply no matter how crumpled we may be.