Beautiful Invitation

The week leading to the cross revealed mankind’s worst—fickle minds and hearts, astoundingly bad decisions, fear and hate driven actions.  All of us have been prone to these maladies in some degree or the other as we knee-jerk in self-preservation.  We’ve all been infected by it. 

It is a mind-boggling thing to consider that we killed the God of the universe in response to our position being threatened, our dignity and authority being challenged by One who could have struck us lame, mute, or dead, but came instead to show us the true identity of both God and man.  It would have been impossible without His willingness to enter our flesh and live our dilemmas, showing mankind another way to do the business of life. 

After the preparation time of Him learning obedience, the teaching officially began, occurring in fewer years than most of us spend in high school.  It was a crash course in the most significant school the world has ever seen.  Done on hillsides and around dinner tables and walking through fields, He taught us.  But we were neither gracious hosts or quick learners.  The few who seemed able to see Him accurately and understand were those who were so low on the societal scale that there was no place to look but up.  And recognize Him some of them did.  His heavenly background was evident from their point of view.

He chose to respond to our mistreatment by carving through the immense wall of our sin and coming out on the other side, leaving a huge hole as a souvenir, a tomb as it was, from where death was expected, but astonishingly, life could begin anew.  Wombs are usually the birthing places, not tombs.  But when has God written the story as we would predict? 

That week we delivered Him the worst of us and then He turned around and delivered us from ourselves.  It is our hope.  He is our hope.  In the week where the worst of who we are was publicly and violently demonstrated, He ends it by swallowing it as the lethal poison it was, and offering us a cup of living water and an invitation to walk out of the tomb.  We can leave our death behind. 

He still offers us a new beginning.  Any moment can be your door forward if you choose to step through it.  He is right there, ready to help you and celebrate the courage that it took for you to take Him up on it.  It may look and feel like your death to give up all that is familiar and step into the unknown of what He will do with you.  But He states it is your life.  And I’m banking on the fact of Who speaks those words and Who has the power to back them up. 

Come.  Live. Take the joy that is yours to have.