Jesus is the greatest gift the world has ever known. Yet not everyone has heard. And for those who have heard, many have chosen to reject Jesus for various reasons. What still can’t be denied is, because of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, we are gifted with the opportunity to have eternal life. The gates of heaven have been opened for us to enter in, because Jesus humbled himself by becoming human and entering the earth as a baby on that wonderful Christmas Day.
The next idea for us to consider is that we are to imitate Jesus. And if Jesus is the greatest gift to us, then how might we be “the greatest gift” to Jesus? We can give our lives to Jesus! Actually, this is the fundamental concept when we put our faith in Jesus. We are choosing to give ourselves over to the headship of the God. We are no longer the master, Christ Jesus is. We become the slave. Salvation is a little quirky, if you think about it.
Matthew 10:39 (ESV) says, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” This means that is it only by giving up control can we be “saved”. Romans 10:9 similarly says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Later, in Romans 12:1, we are appealed by Paul to “present your bodies as living sacrifices.” What greater gift could one give than our lives, as Jesus did on the cross?
Fellow reader, we can come to an infinite number of conclusions of what it means to be a Christian from what we have heard other people say or to what we’ve reasoned. But consider the Biblical passages quoted above. These are from the Spirit of God and Christ Jesus himself. We might be thinking that now with 2022 upon us, there will be a lot of opportunities to make up for the “lost time” we had during the shelter in place we’ve been under. But remember that if we’ve handed over the keys to our life to God, then we need to be asking the LORD what steps he wants us to take for His kingdom and for His glory. This is how we maintain giving our lives to Christ. Take the time to pray and listen to what
God wants to do with your life!
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