From the Pastor's Study
Free and Immediate
Dec 22, 2021
This morning I was ordering a few books through an online source. (They are unavailable through local bookstores, or else I would have done my shopping locally.) The process is very easy: I search for the books in the online store, add them to the checkout, and because my information is already on file, I hit one more button, and the books are ordered. They promise me that the books will arrive in the post office before January 4.
We have become accustomed to being able to do things immediately, and we are more than a little offended when things take longer than expected. Building supplies and car parts, I have heard, take longer to arrive than they used to, sometimes months longer. There are probably many, many more things that we have ordered but take far longer to arrive than expected.
And the prices! It seems that everything has gone up in price considerably. The only thing that remains the same is a brand of breakfast cereal I used to eat every day but now don’t. The cereal is no more expensive than it was five years ago, for some reason. Today, the sale price of most groceries is the same as the regular price a year ago.
We can’t get things immediately anymore, and when we do get them, the price is far higher than in the past. What is this world coming to?
A few years ago, I was at the bedside of a man who was dying. He was in his 90s, and he had been told that he would not live to see the end of the week. He was not too happy about it, but there was nothing he or anyone else could do. I asked him if he was confident of what lay ahead, and he told me he wasn’t. He had been anti-God, but when he was faced with the reality that he might be seeing God soon, he wasn’t too sure he had made the right choices. Meeting God and being held accountable was not a pleasant prospect. He knew that the problem was his sin, although he didn’t use that word.
I asked him if he wanted to be forgiven, and he told me that that would take far too long. He had done a lot of bad things in his life, and he felt that there was no way that he could make things right. He was right on that point. But he was wrong about it taking too long to be forgiven, and I told him so. I shared with him that if he put his trust in Jesus Christ who died on the cross, he would be forgiven immediately. All he had to do was ask for that forgiveness. He wanted that more than anything else, and we prayed a brief prayer together. It was in that very moment that he became a believer, and his sins were forgiven. He finished the prayer with tears in his eyes.
That was faster than ordering books on an online store. He didn’t have to wait for a few days for that forgiveness to arrive. It was there the moment he asked for it, for God gave it to him. And it didn’t cost him anything. It cost Jesus his life, of course, but it didn’t cost this man anything. It was free, and it was immediate.
Some things in life are free, and we can get them right away. Forgiveness in Jesus Christ is one of those things and that forgiveness results in eternal salvation. This man had to wait for a few days to experience the fullness of eternal life, but by the end of the week, he had passed away, and he had entered into eternal glory. If I had ordered books that day, they would have still been in the mail.
In a world where prices are going up and where things are backordered for months, there is one thing that is free and immediate. It is the salvation we receive in Jesus Christ.
This is the result of Christmas. Without Jesus coming to this earth, we would not have that salvation, and it would not be free. We can’t do it of course, but if we had to pay for all the wrong things we did, it would take longer than we have to live. But, because of Christmas, we don’t have to pay, and we receive it as soon as we ask. It cost Jesus, but it doesn’t cost us. This is the true implication of Christmas.
Pastor Gary
