It's your birthday! And you just got a card telling you congratulations on another year well lived. Inside you find a little plastic card with a pretty picture on the front: a gift card! With joy you leap up and wave your gift around! Look how pretty it is! It should be framed and put up on the wall! For the next hour you play with your gift, giving each other back scratches, unlocking the door from the outside with it, cleaning underneath your nails, in cracks around the house. You even play a little bit of finger foot ball with it. Eventually you've had your fun and so you put the gift card in your wallet and forget you even got it in the first place.
A gift card well used.
Or is it?
What is the purpose of a gift card? To buy things with. You put money on the card and then use the card to gain other items of value. It may have a pretty picture on it, or may be handy in a jam when you've lost your keys, but it wasn't created for that purpose. The point is so that you can buy other things.
Christ's atonement is very much like a gift card. He paid the price in full as he suffered in the garden and on the cross. He paid the consequence of our sins so that we wouldn't have to. While we can learn many great things from his suffering - like the importance of laying down our own will and doing the Father's, or how the greatest love a person can have is when they lay down their life for others - that was not the purpose of his atonement.
He suffered so then he could understand every pain that we go through - and then can help us with the trials! We can pray for help, understanding, and peace and he can give it to us! How? Because he has already gone through it. Not only that, but he paid the price for our sins so then we can be made clean. When we make a wrong choice we feel guilty, and that guilt tears us down. Because of his atonement, we can be forgiven and we don't have to carry around that guilt anymore! That is amazing!!
Yet through our lives we rarely use this gift that we've been given. We honor Christ, revere him and remember his sacrifice, but how often do we actually use the gift he has given? Do we repent daily of our sins? Do we turn to him for understanding and peace? Or do we turn to other sources to fill the gap in our hearts?
Christ is the only way we can find happiness in this life. He has provided a way through his atonement for us to have peace. There is no substitutions, no back roads. I know that as you search for His help, you will find it. So seek and find redemption through the mighty power of the atonement.
No comments:
Post a Comment