Riches
We will be driving down the highway this Thanksgiving as day-workers on the Samaritan’s Purse, Georgia Response to Hurricane Michael. At some point, we will exit it and head off to a hotel.
Before we started day 1 of our time in Albany, Georgia, we went through orientation and were each given the Samaritan’s Purse Statement of Faith. One of their statements is as follows: “We believe that all men everywhere are lost and face the judgment of God…” When each person is born, they are on a highway, but not a good one. The destinations that people inflate in their own minds fall short of what God plans. The end of humanity’s highway is not an eternal Disney World. It is more like a horror flick. It often does not look that way; people do not hope for things like that but the life lived on our road ends up like some of the homes after Hurricane Michael went through, or Paradise, California after California’s 2018 Camp Fire went through.
God has an exit for us and along the road God takes us is a true, eternal Paradise. Along that way are good things too. It is not all some bleak escape run through flames though it may have stretches where it looks that way.
Paul said he prayed that the Ephesian Christians might know the riches of God’s inheritance for the saints. Remember our lesson on inheritance? In that lesson, the English word inheritance was shifted to the word allotment. That fits my sense of things better. Paul prayed that believers might know the allotment that has been prepared by God for those who follow him. It is not just an allotment down the road someplace. It is not like American Revolutionary War soldiers receiving land for war service. No, the allotments of God are glorious, ready, and completely tailored to his purposes and to the way that he has made us.
Do not forget that God made every person and to each he offers himself. Many, brush aside his hand presuming the price too high. Well, the price was high: God’s son, but God paid it. That unimaginable thing led to another, and that is the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints: those who would come after Christ. The exit God offers from mankind’s highway ends in a driveway to the best forever: God’s forever made in heaven for you, for me.
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