The Gift

This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.  We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”? Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. (Romans 4:16–17 The MESSAGE)

I enjoyed listening to the message that Pastor Rick Hampton gave at Creekside this past Sunday. I loved his illustrations driving home the point made in the passage above. So many of us have spent way too long trying to pay for what God freely gives; carrying heavy things around, things that God never intended for us to have to carry. 

God is an inviter, continually inviting us to live into the reality of his free and pure gift of goodness and right standing, righteousness, adoption, salvation, peace, freedom -- from him and through him. As amazing as his gift is, I think practically we so often leave it unclaimed and unopened, not realizing in our actual lives the reality of our salvation. We choose to carry weights of earning, obligation or regret. Jesus wants us to be free form all of that. 

What weights are you carrying that you should not be?

• something from your past?
• a current facade that takes energy to maintain?
• a sense of obligation or earning that God requires for you to truly belong? 

What would it look like to be free from that the weight?  

It is not your weight to carry. As the passage above put it, “the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift.” 

Accept it, open it and enjoy it.   

Peace, hope and love

Doug