The Glory of the Gospel

My daughter recommended a book.  In the book, The Insanity of God, Nik Ripken shares lessons he learned from believers in persecution:  how to follow Jesus, how to love Jesus, and how to walk with Jesus.  In chapter 2 Ripken looks back to his rural Kentucky background.  His parents weren’t churchgoers except for Sundays like Christmas and Easter.  They did, however, faithfully send their children for Sunday school and worship.  This may have been for the free babysitting, but Ripken liked to see his friends and he enjoyed the choir music of the morning worship.

At the age of eleven, Ripken had a significant and personal spiritual experience.  It was an Easter Sunday and the church pews were full.  He remembers that the sun made the stained glass windows of the sanctuary glow with a deeper, richer color than he had noticed before.  The pastor’s message recounted the familiar story of all that had happened to Jesus during the Passover week.  Ripken was drawn into the story.  He absorbed the words.  He writes, “For the first time, I understood something of the price that Jesus paid for the sins of the world, and for me.  .  .  When the preacher finally got to the Easter-morning part of the story – the part about the rolled-away stone, the angel, the empty tomb, and the resurrected Jesus – something deep inside of me wanted to shout right out loud:  Hooray!  I felt like breaking into song just like the crowds in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.”

But as he glanced at the people around him, he saw no difference from other Sunday mornings.  Some children drew or wrote on bulletins; some fidgeted; some appeared lost in their own private daydreams.  Most adults seemed to listen intently, but their faces showed no excitement, no enthusiastic response.  He wanted to shout, “Hey everyone!  Are you listening to this?”  He thought, “How in the world was it that these people managed to get so much more excited about what happened at a high school football field on Friday nights than they did about the resurrection of Jesus at church on Easter Sunday morning?”  He concluded that maybe they had heard the story so many times before that, now, they saw it as  .  .  .  just a story.”

He writes, “I am sure that they believed that it was the truth – but it was truth that had very little to do with real life.  Evidently, it was a story that did not demand much excitement or response.”  As I read those words, I was convicted of my own lack of joyful response to the gospel story.  I have the opportunity to hear that exciting story often, but have I allowed it to become too familiar, to become just a story?  I know it to be true and yet does it still excite me?

I was dead in my trespasses and sin.  I was separated from God.  And the Lord Jesus Christ left the glory of heaven and paid the penalty for my sin with His own precious blood.  I have been saved by grace; it is a gift of God.  But, when I have torn the wrappings off, do I toss the gift aside and move on to other activities or do I contemplate the cost of the gift?  I should ponder it often.  My response should be one of grateful excitement.  Thankfulness should overwhelm me and I should sing praises and shout for joy.  I pray that my response would not be numbed by the futile things of this world, but rather, that the story would remain ever fresh and awe-inspiring, that Jesus’ sacrifice for my sake would never become just a story.