7-29-2015

     Good Morning All!!

       Gal. 4:5; “To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.”

      I am afraid this devotion may suffer from a generational divide.  My apologies to the younger set, please talk to your parents and grandparents about this.

    Do you remember trading stamps?  Probably the most traded were S&H Green Stamps.  You would get these stamps when you purchased some items, especially gasoline.  Gasoline cost 25 cents a gallon at a full service gas station and then you got stamps with your purchase; ah the good ole days.  But you would collect the stamps in a book, I like to lick the stamps and then paste them in the book, and then save these books until you had enough stamps saved up.  Then you would look in a catalog and then redeem them for something in the catalog.  It might be a toaster, or a set of dishes, or a pool table.  Now a pool table would take hundreds, if not thousands, of books to redeem to get this item.  Most people would just get the cheaper items.  It was easier and these items were still useful but I always wondered about how someone could have enough stamps to get a pool table.

     It was really quite a crazy concept, really.  We paid too much for the goods and services we received and in return got our own money back in the form of stamps which we used to buy overpriced goods.  Who could really calculate how much stuff cost with this type of barter system?  But that was the beauty of the scheme; we were oblivious to the facts and just enjoyed redeeming our stamps even though we were paying with what was ours in the first place for stuff that was overpriced.  But we redeemed those stamps; essentially, we bought back what was already ours.

    That is why they called it redeeming the stamps.  That is what “redeem” means.  It means to buy what is already yours.  You pay twice for what you have once to start and then later on again.  This is the heart of what God did to us.  He bought us back, even though we were already his.  God created us, sustained us and put us in this creation of his to live.  By any measure that would mean ownership.  Yet we were lost to our sin ad we owed a debt of that sin to the Law to which we were now slaves.

     But God bought us back, redeemed us, with the atoning sacrifice of Jesus who took our place and paid our debt.  So now we have the adoption of sons.  Not of children but of sons.  It was the son who was given the inheritance of what the Father possessed.  So we now are all “sons of God” male or female, Greek or Jew slave or freeman none of that matters because we are all “sons of God” because of the redemption that we receive through Jesus’ sacrifice for us.  We have been adopted back into God’s family as his sons.

 Dear Father, we praise you for the gift of our redemption which Christ earned and then gave to us in your divine mercy.  Keep us in the faith that we may always receive the blessings of being sons of your heavenly family.  All this we ask in Jesus’ precious name, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret