Monday, April 29, 2013

A Toles Road


This is a story of a girl walking along a road. It’s not just any road. It's a toll road. A road where a price must be paid. But the girl didn’t have any tokens. She couldn’t pay the price she owed. And then something beautiful happened. Someone paid it for her. Someone showed her love and gave her a token to pay the price she owed. This is my story. It’s a Toles Road. And it’s a story of how Jesus Christ gave his very life to pay the price I owed for my sin. This is a story of how Christ showed me redeeming love and gave me a token to pay my toll. It’s a story of how he is walking with me along this road, continuing to show me tokens of redeeming love.

I was born into a family with believing parents, and was blessed to be taught the truths of the bible from an early age. I did not understand deep theology when I was little, but I believe I had the faith of a child. This has caused me to struggle some in sharing my testimony because I don’t know an exact moment when the Lord saved me and there wasn’t a drastic turning point in my life. But I am grateful that the Lord chose to save me at a young age. As a child, the Lord used my parents, church, and teachers to give me an understanding of who He was. I was taught and believed the truths of the Bible...that there is one true and Holy God who created all things, that we have all disobeyed Him and are dead in our sins, and that Jesus Christ is God’s Son who came to earth, lived a perfect life, and died on the cross to save the world from sin. As I grew older, I realized that Jesus’s death was personal for me. He didn’t come just to save the world; he came to save me. I also began to take ownership of my faith as I grew older. I learned how to study the Word on my own and realized that being a follower of Christ involved an active relationship with him. I remember wondering at one point when I was 10 or 11 if I believed these truths just because that’s what my parents believed and that’s what I had been taught. I wondered if I would have believed differently if I had been born somewhere like India and had been taught a different religion. Over time, the Holy Spirit worked in me to show me that it was purely grace that I had been saved. It was grace that I was born into a context where I had been exposed to the Gospel. It was grace that the Lord opened my eyes to see the truth and soften my heart towards Him. I learned that God chose me and that there wasn’t anything I could have done to be saved. I knew God as my Father and my Friend, but up until the last couple years, there was a piece missing. I didn’t understand the Lord as my Husband. I remember hearing a sermon once and the pastor was talking about being passionately in love with the Lord. I struggled with this thought because I had loved the Lord for a long time but I never really understood being in love with Him. It wasn't until the ending of my first relationship that I began to understand the Lord as my Husband. And it has been since that time that the Lord has continued to teach me about redeeming love. 

In the book of Hosea, we see a picture of the Lord pursuing, wooing, warning, and disciplining in order to bring about repentance in the rebellious Israelites. The Israelites had turned away from God and given themselves over to the worship of idols. Similarly, Hosea’s wife, Gomer, had been unfaithful to her husband and continually run after her lovers. The Lord calls Hosea to love Gomer the way that He loves Israel...with redeeming love. This is not a feeling or an expression of words. It is an action. It is a choice to show sacrificial love to another, denying yourself in order to do good for them, even when it is not deserved and the desired response in not forthcoming. It is persistent and persevering. Hosea showed this love to Gomer by providing for her, pleading with her, protecting her, sacrificing for her, disciplining her, and wooing her, all the while she was unfaithful to him. We see that the Lord loved Israel with redeeming love in the same ways. And we are just like Gomer and the stubborn Israelites. We have prostituted ourselves, turning from our Creator to ourselves and things of this world just as Israel had. And God has shown us redeeming love by sacrificing His Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the redemption price for us. Christ gave his life to buy us back. Christ died to provide a way for us to return to Him in repentance. Repentance is necessary in order to return to the Lord. And repentance is hard because it requires that we revisit areas of pain and brokenness. And when we think of repentance that is usually where we leave it. But repentance also involves reward. It involves the gift of redemption through Christ. As redeemed, we have been wooed just as Hosea describes His wooing of Gomer and God’s wooing of Israel. We have a Husband who desires to speak tenderly to us, who has blessed us, and has equipped us to be faithful. We are no longer enslaved to our baals, our sins. We are no longer slaves to our lovers of this world. We no longer need to remember the names of our baals but call upon the name of our God, our Husband. He provides for us. He is faithful. And He has given us His Son and His Spirit so that we can be presented before him pure and righteous...and so that we can be faithful to Him.  And because of what He has done for us, we can know Him. We can know Him intimately and deeply and truly. We can know him not just as Father and Friend...we can know Him as Husband.