The Heirloom That Couldn't Be Bought

In 2019, a house fire swept through the Martinez family home in Sacramento, California. Insurance covered the structure, the furniture, the electronics — everything with a price tag. But when Maria Martinez sifted through the ashes, she wept over one loss no check could replace: her grandmother's hand-stitched christening gown, carried from Guadalajara in 1953, worn by four generations of babies on their baptism day. "They kept asking me to name a dollar amount," Maria told a local reporter. "But how do you price something that was never for sale?"

Every appraiser understood gold and silver. Not one could calculate the worth of a grandmother's love sewn into cotton thread.

Peter makes the same distinction to scattered believers living as strangers in a hostile world. You were not redeemed with perishable things — not silver, not gold, not anything the market can quote. The currency of your freedom was the precious blood of Christ, chosen before the foundation of the world. The old life, inherited from your ancestors like empty traditions, was purchased out from under you at a cost no economy could bear.

And here is the staggering part: unlike Maria's christening gown, what God gives is imperishable. The living Word that brought you into new birth does not burn, does not fade, does not rot in the ashes of time. You have been ransomed by something a fire can never touch.