‘My Precioussss…’

[470 words]  Gollum/Smeagol is one of my favorite literary characters in Tolkien’s Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Gollum talks to himself obsessively over the One Ring—even after he loses it in the deep caverns of the Misty Mountains. He constantly seeks his “precious” ring which Baggins finds. While Peter writes some two thousand years before Tolkien, he talks about the spiritual things that Christians ought to see as precious. In Peter’s letters, he writes as we journey from here to eternity. Here are five things Peter emphasizes as exceedingly “precioussss” that a Christian should hold: Your genuine faith is precious (1:5-7). He compares the faith of these suffering Christians to gold that is tested by fire. He says that “your faith,” being tested by fire, is found to be far more precious than gold that perishes. How strange that in difficult times, a Christian may be tempted to…