purity

It’s the end of the year. Christmas has come and gone, and we’re well into Epiphany. I started this year reading about the creation and the fall, and read my way through the whole Bible. I walked with the prophets through Advent, and rejoiced with the shepherds, Simeon and Anna at the birth of the baby. 

It’s an amazing story, from start to finish. It’s wonderful, and reassuring. It has the best ending of any story possible, because of Christmas, Good Friday, Easter and Ascension Day. I serve a risen Savior, I serve an ascended Lord. 

And here’s why that’s so awesome: Look at John’s description of home, in Revelation 21:22-27. “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”

When Adam and Eve committed that first act of rejection, God started on his epic work of salvation. He worked in this world until conditions were just right and the time was perfect, and then he sent Jesus. Jesus did the thing I couldn’t do, he made an appropriate payment to God for my sin. As a result, my name is in the Lamb’s book of life. My name is in the book!

For all my present impurity, I’m already eternally pure. What an amazing, humbling thought. What a great end to this story. What a great end to my story!

Happy New Year! But more than that, I hope you too have this wonderful new life.