Often people pass by people in their circumstances and all they can see is the trash on the service. But as Priscilla Shirer explains in this video from the Discerning the Voice of God Bible study, there is value and there is a treasure underneath the surface.
Learn more about the Discerning the Voice of God Bible study here.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
We have some friends that live in the southwest part of Texas and these friends of ours, we love them so much. They are a very intriguing and eccentric couple. They love the Lord and they own a dump. Literally. They own one of the largest waste management systems in the southwest region of our country. They own acres and acres of land solely for the purpose of collecting trash. And I mean thousands of acres of land, because they are the collectors for a whole region of the country. And so they have all of these acres of land that they purchased.
And when they purchased it, the neighbors in the community of these thousands of acres of land had a problem with it. They didn’t want anybody coming in and buying up this land for the purpose of collecting trash. They had a problem with how the value of the area would go down if this trash dump was situated right where they were stationed. And so there were a lot of pushbacks. There were a lot of hurdles that they had to get over to be able to purchase this land.
We’ve gone and we’ve seen the land. And [our friend] says, “What do you see when you look over there?” Trash. “What do you see when you look over there?” Trash. He says, “That’s not trash. That’s good living right there is what that is.”
We sat down to lunch with them and they said, “Let me tell you something.” He said recently, someone from the government came and knocked on the door. And they told us that they can tell with their projections and their satellites and all of the work that they do there in that particular arm of the works of the city, so that they could tell that in years to come, decades to come, there’s going to be a little bit of a shortage of water. They’re trying to figure that out way in advance for this particular region of the country. They’re just trying to figure out exactly what to do to make sure that there is clean water continually for the people that live in that area. And the person that knocked on the door not only told us that, but told us that with their satellites and GPS’s they were looking for the best place to find, to find fresh water that could continue on for generations. That it looked like there was a spring of water right underneath the ground in the middle of those thousands of acres of trash.
So I asked if they could come dig. And so, our friends said, “Sure. Come on in and dig and see.” And sure enough, they dug down deep into the ground and up sprung a leak. Up sprung a fresh, vital fountain of water. So of course the government wants this land.
The owners of this land, our friends, they’re just standing back a little bit with a smile on their face. Because they realized that everybody who passes by, they just see trash. But they don’t know that underneath the ground there is living water bubbling up. There is value. There is treasure underneath this mound of trash.
So they said, “You know what? We don’t care that everybody that comes here see trash. We don’t care that everybody that passes by sees trash. Because we know the value of the land that we are standing on.”
Do you know that no matter what has happened in your present circumstances, no matter what has happened in your past, no matter where you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done, no matter what abuses you have suffered, other people might pass by you and they might say, “trash”, but when you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, the Holy Spirit of God took up residence in you. There is a well of living water on the inside of you ready to spring up in the life of anyone who will yield and surrender themselves to the power of the Holy Spirit in their lives.