A list of my top 10 favorite movies of all-time includes “It’s A Wonderful Life.” In the movie, George Bailey considers jumping from a snow-covered bridge into a river to end his life, due to a financial crisis.

But God sends an angel named Clarence to rescue him. “I wish I’d never been born,” George tells his guardian angel. George Bailey soon finds out how different everyone else’s life would have been if he’d never been born.

This movie classic gives us a vivid picture of the value of every human life; not just George’s, but his wife and children and people in his town. As Clarence says, “Every man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole.”

“It’s a Wonderful Life” shows how every one of us has a role in life that only we can play. Every human life has value because God has a purpose for each of our lives that we are born to fulfill.

For instance, a missionary and his wife serving in the Philippines find out she’s pregnant after taking a strong medication for a serious illness. Doctors encourage her to abort her unborn baby because of the potential for those medications to harm the child she was carrying.

The couple chooses life and gives birth to a healthy son. Their boy eventually excels in football as a quarterback, wins the Heisman Trophy and Tim Tebow went on to play in the NFL.

A young teen becomes pregnant as a result of a sexual assault. Despite the circumstances of her birth, the baby girl grows up to bless millions with her voice. Ethel Waters rose to stardom as a talented singer and actress who appeared in Broadway plays and Hollywood movies.

Perhaps she is best known for singing “His Eye is on the Sparrow” at Billy Graham Crusades.

The news reports in recent weeks have shown us signs reading “Black lives matter” and “Cops’ lives matter.”

I believe every life matters because every life, both born and unborn, is precious and has the potential to impact many others.

According to Genesis 1:27, God “created man in His own image.”

His Word says He knows us before we are born (Jeremiah 1:5).

Since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court made abortion on demand legal during the entire nine months of pregnancy, more than 57 million lives have been ended before they were born.

We will never know the impact their lives would have had on the world around them.

Could one of them have been the scientist with the intellect to find the cure for cancer or AIDS?

A future president? An astronaut? Or a Billy Graham?

In recent years, three states – Oregon, Washington and Montana have legalized euthanasia, sometimes called assisted suicide. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has said, “If we ever decide that a poor quality of life justifies ending that life, we have taken a step down a slippery slope that places all of us in danger.”

God “gives to all life, breath, and all things” (Acts 17:25).

Only He knows when life should begin and end.