Masses of people are scurrying about trying to finish their list before Christmas Eve. Fortunately for those of us in New England this year we don’t have any snow to hamper our doings. While doing my doings today I heard people greet each other with “Are you ready for Christmas?” Some people had reduced it to “Are you ready?” I thought it might be a great greeting all the time – referring to the second coming of Jesus. Are you ready?
I grew up in an environment where it wasn’t PC to say “Yes.” We were trained to say, “I hope so.” After all we might have sinned in the past hour and hadn’t had a chance to ask for forgiveness. As a child of God who has read the Gospels and the letters of Paul I now understand how insulting that is to God. It takes love out of the equation and replaces it with a computer-like program of ons and offs. Sin and it’s off. Ask for forgiveness and it’s on. That is really pathetic. If we as parents loved our children that way the state social service should remove them from us.
Salvation isn’t about ons and offs. It is about family. Being in God’s family with Him being the best ever Father is what Jesus talked about. Just as a good human parent would not cast his child out of the house for an infraction of some sort neither will God reject us; especially for an unknown sin of some kind. Salvation is about belonging to the family. We enter the family by accepting the invitation. So do it. Once done we can always answer with a big “Yes” to the question “Are you ready?”
Written by Roger Bothwell on December 24, 2015
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