Some fight against this offer of living life under the umbrella of grace and mercy on the grounds that they would much rather stand or fall on their own merit rather than have their fate decided by someone or something else.
Good luck with that.
If redemption is the universal cry of our souls, what sign or proof do we have either in our own personal experience or the experience of human history that we are able to secure that redemption for ourselves?
Redemption, that is the making right of all the broken places in our lives, seems to require some sort of in-breaking from the outside. To draw upon my eleventh grade chemistry recollections, if our lives are "closed systems" then we are stuck with our own baggage and redemption is impossible. If all of human history is a closed system then humanity as a whole is doomed.
But the Christian story is that the precise in-breaking that is needed to turn the story around has happened. When we were stuck in our regrets and guilt and shame, God came to get us. God himself has become one of us, entered into our regrets and guilt and shame and finally into death itself and overcome all of it. He has redeemed all of History in precisely the only way it could be redeemed.
And so you and I don't have to struggle and strive for the redemption our souls long for. It has been fought for and won already on our behalf and it's now offered to us as a free gift.
Merry Christmas.
No comments:
Post a Comment