The cross has been on my heart this morning. I’ve been thinking about Jesus and the price He paid. In order to help you understand my thoughts, imagine this situation:
Imagine that a friend gives you free tickets to your favorite musicians’ concert. Not only does the gift include the best seats in the house, but it includes a week full of pre-concert activities including dinners, movies, amusement parks, shopping sprees, etc. As the week begins, you are so busy that you decide you really don’t have time to do all the other things. You will plan on going to the concert, but the rest of the stuff just can’t fit into your schedule.
But your friend bought all of it for you. It wasn’t cheap either. It cost a lot of money. But your friend loves you and knows you could stand to have a little fun. Still, you are too busy. And you're kind of scared of roller coasters. So you eventually go to the concert, but that’s it.
How would you feel, if you were the friend who gave the gift?
Jesus died on the cross to give us eternal salvation for free. It’s called grace. Most of us get that. We know that if you “confess with your lips, Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead you will be saved (Romans 10:9).” So in other words, our friend Jesus bought us a ticket to heaven and gave it to us as a free gift. And it wasn’t cheap. It cost Him His life. So we accept it. We forget though that Jesus did not just die to get us into heaven. He also died to set us free from the sin that makes our lives miserable HERE. He gave us grace to enter the concert (heaven), but He also gave us a whole life of freedom from the sin that weighs us down, destroys our lives, and the lives of others. These are pre-heaven activities, you could say, that we are just too busy, too scared, or too careless to enjoy. So many times we just live like we are thankful for the concert tickets but we never take advantage of the other opportunities that are included in the gift. We live with our guilt, with our anger, with our shame, with our hurt, and with our shattered dreams.
Just as that friend would be sad that he spent all his money on a week full of activities that we decided not to enjoy, so Jesus must feel when He sees us live like we are still slaves to sin. We don’t live like we are free, we live like we are just getting by until we get to heaven. We accept the gift of salvation THERE but not the gift of freedom HERE.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” -Galatians 5:1
I don’t want to put on that yoke. I want to live in a way that shows Jesus that His pain, the price He paid, was not all in vain. He died to set me free from all of my insecurities, my sins, my guilt. I refuse to live like I am still enslaved by them. I was set free. I want to live like I’m free.
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