What gift are you giving?
In recent weeks, I have made the comment that in reflecting on the last 24 Hours of Jesus’ life, I see the themes of judgement and grace. We are reminded of the depth of our sin as we observe every character failing Jesus. At the same time, we see Jesus, fueled by his compassion and grace, presenting himself as a sacrificial offering for the redemption of the world.
The difficulty of talking about judgement and grace is that for most of us, those two words are polar opposites. We think of judgement in terms of punishment and grace in terms of “getting off the hook.” Neither of these understandings are entirely accurate according to the Biblical story.
To think of judgement in the Biblical sense begins with the idea that, “all have fallen short,” and grace was never meant to be an excuse to avoid the demands of discipleship.
So how then do we live in response to this story?
Sunday morning I was reminded of how I answer that question.
This past Sunday was my birthday. When my daughter woke up on Sunday, she came walking into the living room witha big smile on her face. She didn’t stop by the couch to give me a hug. She went straight to the kitchen with her sneaky grin still intact. Climbing up into the seat by the bar, she opened up her box of crayons and began to go to work on a paper sack she had picked out to wrap up the present she had gotten for me.
I was getting ready for church which meant I was wandering around the house collecting things I needed for the morning. Whenever I entered the room, she would catch me out of the corner of her eye, give another wry smile, and attempt to cover up the artwork she was creating.
She could not have been more excited about making this gift for her daddy’s birthday.
I took this picture of her while she worked.
In the Message translation, The Apostle Paul writes to the church at Rome, “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.” In other words, the life that we live before God is the gift that we offer to God.
Each day you and I make choices.
We set priorities by where we choose to invest our time, our talent and our resources.
We choose whether to bless or to curse… to love or to withhold it… to forgive or to remain captive to unforgiveness.
We are either making the gift of our life more beautiful or marring the beauty that our lives were meant to reflect to our Creator.
My daughter could not wait to present her gift to me. She took delight in sharing it with me.
Why?
Because despite my faults and shortcomings, my daughter knows that her daddy loves her.
That’s what we find at the heart of the last 24 hours… A God who loves us.
When are lives are defined by that truth… that our Heavenly Father loves us… the honor of presenting our lives before him as our “offering” becomes the true joy of life.








