Wishing to encourage her young son’s progress on the piano, a mother took the boy to a see the famous Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski in concert. After they were seated, she spotted a friend and walked down the aisle to greet her. The little boy seized the opportunity to explore the wonders of the concert hall, and soon found his way to a door marked “No Admittance.”
The house lights dimmed to signal that the concert was about to begin, and the mother returned to her seat to discover her son missing. Before she could find him, the curtains parted and spotlights focused on an impressive Steinway on stage. She looked up to see her little boy sitting at the keyboard, innocently picking out, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” At that moment, the great piano master made his entrance, quickly moved to the piano, and whispered in the boy’s ear, “Don’t quit; keep playing!”
Leaning over, Paderewski’s left hand began filling in a bass part. His right arm reached around and added a running obligato. Together, the old master and the young novice transformed an embarrassing situation into a wonderfully creative experience. 
That is what God does with us. He takes our feeble efforts and makes something useful to His kingdom. Peter recognized this when he wrote: “If any man minister, let him do it as of the ability which God giveth: that God in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and dominion for ever and ever” (1 Peter 4:11).
Being created by a purposeful God, every person has the potential to do great things. God accomplishes things through us we could never do on our own. Jesus said, “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God” (Luke 18:27).
Scriptural Value: The Proposition Looked at from a Biblical Perspective
Some things are valuable for sentimental reasons. A thing might have little value to someone else, but to one person it is priceless. So it is with us. The world might think we have little or no worth, but God is “sweet on us”—we possess sentimental value to Him.
God Is Crazy about You.
If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.
If He had a wallet, your photo would be in it.
He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning.
Whenever you want to talk, He will listen.
He could live anywhere in the universe; He chose your heart.
What about the gift He sent you in Bethlehem;
Not to mention that Friday at Calvary!1
There are three basic truths about God’s love for us:
God loves us more than we can understand.
Others may love us because we are cute, rich, or fun to be around, but God does not need a reason to love us (cf. Deuteronomy 7:7; Romans 5:6–8). His love really has nothing to do with us; it has to do with Him. God loves because He is love (1 John 4:16). He cannot help it. It is just what He does. In a manner of speaking, God does not love; He is love. Exchange the name “God” and put “Love” in its place. Love created us. Love gave His Son for us. Love saved us. Love offers us heaven. Love’s Spirit is with us now, and with Love we shall someday be.
God loved us before we were born (Psalm 139:16) and will love us after we die. Even after our earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved, “we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Corinthians 5:1).
God loves us when it does not feel like it. Did Joseph feel loved in Potiphar’s house, or in that African prison? (Genesis 39; 41). Did Moses feel loved on the backside of nowhere as an Egyptian ex-patriot? (Exodus 1–3). Did Job feel loved as he scraped his sores and tearfully remembered his missing children? (Job 1–2). Probably none of these did, but God loved them as much during their days of shadow as their days of sunshine.
Charles Spurgeon once walked through the English countryside with a friend. He noticed a barn’s weather vane had the words: “GOD IS LOVE.” Spurgeon remarked that that was an inappropriate place for that message. “Weather vanes are changeable,” he said, “but God’s love is constant.”
His friend replied: “You misunderstand. That sign means that regardless of which way the wind blows, God still loves.”
God wants us to love Him back.
One asked Jesus perhaps the most important query ever presented to Him: “Master, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus replied, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Matthew 22:36–38; cf. Mark 12:30). We thus are to love God emotionally (heart), spiritually (soul), mentally (mind), and physically (strength). That is, we are to fully devote ourselves to Him.
God wants us to love others as He loves us.
Jesus wants to pin a love badge on each of us: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34–35). Winston Churchill once said, “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
Years ago a young sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore assigned his class a project. They were to interview 200 city teen boys residing in downtown slums and predict their futures. The students predicted that ninety percent of the teens would end up in prison at some point.
Twenty-five years later the same professor asked another class to track down the original boys. One hundred eighty were located but only four had ever been in jail. Why were the predictions so wrong? Looking for common factors, the students noticed that more than one hundred boys had mentioned the same teacher, Mrs. O’Rourke, from their local public school. The sociology students searched for and finally located a seventy-year-old Sheila O’Rourke in a Memphis nursing home. Puzzled by the interest in her, she said simply, “All I ever did was love each of them.”2 The more we love Him, the more we love those around us.
Do I really matter? Oh, yes!
– Allen Webster
[1]HTH volume 6 (2001), number 5.
[2]Robert J. Hastings,Hastings’ Illustrations (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1971). p. 32.
