I heard something at church tonight and I wanted to see what the general consensus out there was. I have never been taught the Bible the way I have in the church I belong to now...never had the understanding / practicality of it all I guess.
Tonight, one woman spoke to the kids and I listened to her story. It is about 2 children who LOVED mud pies. One day another child came along and offered a trip to the Beach, all the children had to do was accept the trip and they could play in the sand all they wanted, enjoy the beauty of the beach as opposed to their mud pies. These kids decided NOT to go to the Beach, because they could not give up their mud pies....even though the sandy beach would have been more appealing and better to play in.
She acquainted the mud pies to our sins and the Beach to the almighty Heaven and Salvation. We must give up our mud pies in order to go to the Beach, no hidden fees etc...just give up the mud pies, but we hang on to them afraid to let them go.
She then explained that in Philippians 2:9-11 it states:
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
That be it in this life or the next, ALL of us, believers or not, will meet the Lord and we will then be faced with the fact if we accepted or denied him.
That was profound to me. To know that we would stand before him and KNOW that we had accepted or denied, KNEW we were wrong or right, and KNOW if our names are written in the book of Life. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Not that I had not heard variations of this before, but to hear her say it with such conviction, emotion and raw feeling did something to me inside that is unexplainable. It became so real to me and a way to explain it to my children and people in the world who are non believers. Kind of a 'YOU may not believe in God, but HE believes in YOU' type of thing.
I just sat in awe....wow...no other words.
1 comment:
LeAnne,
It sounds as if you have found a great church. I have come to believe that the entire Old Testament is a physical picture of a spiritual truth... and my salvation story is told in the story of the Exodus.
The Israelites were saved by the blood of the lamb. They didn't have to do anything but believe God when he said that the blood of the lamb would save them. Their salvation was an act of grace. They could do nothing to save themselves. Jesus is our lamb.
When they left Egypt, there was a physical picture to remind them that they were no longer part of that world -- a world that valued things, worshipped idols and a world in which they were slaves. The Israelites walked on dry land through the Red Sea. We live in a world that values the physical over the spiritual. We have idols in our lifes. We are enslaved by our attraction to those things, our own sins. In my church, we are baptized as an adult after accepting Jesus as Savior. Our baptism is a physical picture that we are dead to all of that and are now free. We are supposed to have left our mud pies. Many churches practice infant baptism, mine does not, but I think the picture stays the same. After all, the young, infant first born sons of Israel were protected by their parents belief that the blood of the lamb would save them.
It is now that we learn the standard that God has for us and how we are to live. The Israelites were given the law to follow. We are given the Holy Spirit as a guide. And, we begin to walk. This is the journey that takes us to the beach. We will spend an eternity with God. I don't know about heaven. I am not sure I want to spend a lifetime as some disembodied spirit. The book of Revelations seems to say that God is going to redeem the Earth. We are promised resurrection bodies, just like Jesus.
The Israelites physically left Egypt, but they still bore the emotional scars of having been there. They looked back at the time they were slaves and thought it was a glorious time. They longed for their mud pies. They recreated the idols from Egypt.
Leaving our mud pies is really much harder than it sounds. Because we have to keep our eyes on a promise that we haven't seen yet. If I never saw a sandy beach, mud pies look pretty good. And, the sandy beach you describe sounds too good to be true. You might just be pulling my leg.
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