RESCUED
The Bible says,
“God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, [Jesus Christ], that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
Rescued by Grace
DOG TAG
Sarah was a 10-year-old Jew living in a small village in occupied France. One night the Germans kicked in the door of her house and found a young mother making supper for a daughter. Her mother was shot point-blank, and the girl was thrown into a German army truck, driven to a prison compound, and tagged for the gas chamber.
She was sitting in the barracks on the eve of being sent to a concentration camp when a man came up to her in the darkness and asked her a question. “Are you Sarah Pertofsky?”
She said, “Yes.”
The man said, “I’m your uncle, and I have around my neck a green dog tag. I’m a Jew and a machinist, and they are keeping me for work. You have a red dog tag, and that’s not good. I’m going to trade tags with you.”
So he took her tag and placed his around her neck.
“Let’s go outside,” he said. “I need to show you something.”
Outside, he pointed to the Big Dipper and showed her how its lip points to the North Star.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “I’ve found a hole in the fence just big enough for a little girl to squeeze through. When the guard passes the hole in the fence, I will push you through, and I want you to put that North Star over your shoulder and keep it there and go. You’ll be headed south. I want you to run straight south for three days until you come to a village.
My wife lives there, and she will take care of you.”
In the darkness, they crept to the fence, and as the guard passed, her uncle handed her three crusts of bread that he’d saved, and he pushed her through. Sarah ran across the road, hid in a clump of tall grass, and turned and waved goodbye to him.
Then she ran and ran and ran, all night long. When morning came, she stopped and licked some dew off the grass and ate one of the crusts of bread. Then she went off again, straight south. She stopped to drink water from a creek but kept going. On the third afternoon, she saw an old farmer hoeing a field. Sarah ran up to him and cried, “Monet? Monet?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know Monet.”
He brought her to that village, and they found her aunt. The aunt took her in, raised her, and put her through school.
The uncle of Sarah Pertofsky— paid the price for a little 10-year-old girl. He purchased her life by giving his own.
GOD RESCUED US
I love this story because to me it is such a great analogy of what God did for us and the way that God loves us. God demonstrated his love for us in this that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
Our freedom wasn’t free; it cost him a great sacrifice. Just like the uncle in the story, he purchased our life by giving his own.
Many people have a hard time with the concept of grace. The Bible says that,
“Not by works of righteousness that we have done but according to his mercy he has saved us.”
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God.”
A lot of people think that when they stand before God at the end of their life he is going to pull out a scale and see if their good outweighs their bad. If it does they believe they go to heaven if it doesn't they go to hell.
But this is actually the exact opposite of how God says it will go down. He says that on our own merit, ability, and power we all fall short of the glory of God. Every one of us has broken God's law and the end result of sin is death. BUT God in his great mercy saved us.
As an undeserved free gift, he offers us not just a full pardon of our sins but also the very reward that he had earned with his perfect life.
The son of God bore our pain as the Bible says,
“But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds, we are healed.”
GRACE IS SO HARD FOR US TO ACCEPT
Many of us have worked our whole lives for the things we wanted. We learned at a young age that when you depend on other people you are often left disappointed, so we started depending on ourselves alone. We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and we carried our own burdens.
Of course, we thought it would have been nice to have dependable people around who could shoulder some of the burdens but after being burned, that concept seemed like only a distant fantasy.
“Nothing is free, everything is earned” is the American Motif. Grinding and one-man shows is our way of life.
Because we think that God is like men even maybe like the men who take his name and claim to represent him, we think that God too is undependable. We think he expects us to live up to his expectations by our own grit and willpower. The concept of Grace is so very hard for us to accept.
But God wants you to know that he is nothing like mankind. He wants to be your shoulder to cry on. He wants to teach you how to receive the love you've longed for since you were a little child. The perfect love you thought was just a fairy tale is actually very real. He wants you to be dependent on him. He wants to be your sustainer. He doesn't expect you to do it on your own. He created you to only be able to do it through his power.
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”
“Grace is love that cares and stoops and rescues.”
THE FOCUS OF THE SALVATION STORY IS GRACE
The story of salvation gets a bad rap because people focus so much on the part about how “we are sinners” aka we ain't perfect. But is that really that big of news? That isn’t supposed to be the capstone of the story, you're missing the point.
The focus of the story is how much God loves. How his love is unconditional even in the face of your mistakes. How he will never leave you. Yes he does say we are imperfect but he only brings it up because he is explaining that our imperfections never stopped him from loving us and he doesn't want them to get in the way of our relationship with him. We don’t have to earn his love; it is freely given.
The story is about the grace and undeserved gift he bought for us with his blood. it's about the abundant life he planned for you. If you say yes to God, his love will change you from the inside out. His love will empower you to become more like him.
You don’t need to do anything to get the dog tag but you do need to do something WITH the dog tag.
Now some people also get confused in the opposite way.
They think that when they hear salvation is a free gift and you don’t have to do anything to earn it, that means you don’t have to do anything at all WITH the gift. If we don’t have to do anything with it then why isn’t everyone saved?
Here's one way to help understand it.
The girl couldn’t have gotten out of the death camp by her own effort; she needed the uncle's sacrifice as a ticket out. She also didn’t earn the uncle's love or his sacrificial act by being a good person. He did it because he loved her cause she was his family.
But the girl did play a role in receiving his gift. Once the Uncle offered her the ticket out she had to accept the gift of the dog tag and run away from the death camp.
If she just said “thank you uncle” but never used the dog tag to get herself out of the death camp, she would still be in line for the gas chamber.
You can't earn your way to heaven or your own forgiveness of sin by trying to be a good person. Our righteousness is like filthy rags before God.
God switched places with you and sacrificed himself so you can be free and be seen as perfectly righteous and innocent before him. He gave you his one-way ticket to eternal life and took your dog tag of death. He loved you because he is love and you are his family. He didn’t make the sacrifice for you cause you earned it. He did it freely BECAUSE OF HIS GRACE his undeserved kindness.
But the part you do play is you now need to accept the ticket out that he bought for you, change directions and run out of the death camp.
You don’t need to do anything to receive the dog tag, but you do need to do something with the dog tag in order for it to effectively free you from death.
Running from the death camp in this scenario represents changing your allegiance from self to God. Following him so he can lead you down the path of life.
It is when you recognize that you are not a good ruler of your life and you change your seat of decision making from following your own whims and desires which God says leads to sin which leads to death. And instead, put God in the authority seat of your life and choose to follow him on a new path.
Following him will lead you away from the selfish ways that lead to death and into a new life. The life he designed you for, full of joy, peace, and love.
So what will it be? Stay in the death camp? Or take hold of the free gift that was purchased for you, run from the death camp, and find the life and love that God destined for you since the beginning of time.
Click here if you want to learn more about how to receive this free gift of salvation and how to start your new path in relationship with God today
And as always have a blessed week.