Wed Inspiration

Morning Inspiration with Pastor Merritt

I want to say something that is as serious as anything I’ll ever say. If you have absolutely no desire to draw near to God I doubt very seriously you know God at all, because who would not want to draw near to the God that created you? To the God who sent His Son to die for you? To the God who wants to spend eternity with you? The only reason we can draw near to God is because God first drew near to us when He sent Jesus to be one of us and to die for us.

On January 12, 2007, Joshua Bell walked into a Washington, DC Metro station wearing jeans, a long-sleeved tee shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. He opened a violin case, removed his instrument, threw a few dollars and pocket change into the case as seed money and started to play. For 43 minutes he played classical music. During that time, 1097 people passed by. Twenty-seven people stopped long enough to toss in a total of $32.17. Of those 1097 people, only 7 people paused longer than 60 seconds and only 1 of the 7 recognized Joshua Bell.

Who is Joshua Bell? He was no ordinary street musician with a two-bit fiddle. He is one of the world’s greatest violinists, who just three days prior to this Metro appearance that was staged by the Washington Post filled Boston’s Symphony Hall where the cheapest ticket went for $100 a seat. Normally, his fee for playing, rounds out to about $1000 a minute. That day he didn’t even earn enough money to get into one of his own concerts.

How could this happen? It wasn’t because of the instrument he was playing. That violin he was playing was a Stradivarius that was worth $3.5 million. It wasn’t the music, because the pieces he was playing were some of the greatest classical pieces of music ever written.

Yet, 1,090 people didn’t even notice it. They were too busy. They were too preoccupied. They had too many other things to do to stop and listen to one of the greatest musicians in the world, playing on one of the most expensive instruments in the world, some of the greatest music that has ever been written in the world.

I wonder how many of us will get to heaven and look back on the time we spent on earth and realize that God was waiting to speak to me in His Bible and I never bothered to listen. God was waiting to hear from me and I never bothered to speak. The greatest privilege in life that I had that was absolutely free to spend time being intimate with the Creator of this universe I wasted on other things. Because you are dear to God you can draw near to God. If you will draw near to Him, He will draw near to you. When that happens, you will be more than ever before!