Forever I Shall Remember my Lord Jesus Christ

Forever I Shall Remember my Lord Jesus Christ

How often do we give thanks for the many blessings we receive?  How much do we appreciate the gifts of compassion we are not worthy to have as something to remember?  These are but two of the many valued treasures that God was ready to hand to his human creatures from the very instant he created us.  If he would have created man in such a way that we would never sin or reject his presence as something to worship and praise him for, he would have made a symbol of always saying yes and not appreciating what he was all about.  

If we decide to hand our children anything they desire without any effort of understanding the value of our love, they would treat the items as their right to use and abuse these hard given gifts as if they mean nothing.  Teaching these children to appreciate what they earn through learning what that means should become a priority.  Of course with the gifts God gives us cannot be earned but learned with a desire to appreciate everything he gives us.  

We may try to understand the generosity of God’s handing us so much that if we try to emulate his unending goodness and kindness we would fail since our tendency to give up some of what we worked for is not readily given away.   However, God already saw how man would find selfishness is an easy attribute of greed.  But to not allow man to learn through mistakes he would never work to overcome his selfish nature and discover the need to learn why God is so magnanimous to his greatest creation in mankind.

All of this brings us to the Cross at Calvary that God could have shown a selfish decision to only give that freedom from sin to certain people.  Who would fit that opportunity to gain eternal freedom from death?  God also knew that man is too evil in his desire to be honest with his maker and even his neighbor.  “When the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how the desire that his heart conceived was ever anything but evil, he regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was grieved.”  (Gn 6: 5 - 6).

“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and choosing from every clean animal and every clean bird, he offered holocausts on the altar.  When the Lord smelled the sweet odor, he said to himself, “Never again will I doom the earth, because of man, since the desires of man’s heart are evil from the start, nor will I ever again strike down all living beings, as I have done.”  (Gn 8: 20 - 21).

Even in his anger, God relented and remembered his love for the man he created; out of love for this being that had to grow and learn why God created man, forgave him, and welcomed all of us through the sacrifice he granted us through his Son Jesus Christ who is the seat of love and forgiveness.

Ralph B. Hathaway