Only 340-350 days left until Christmas! I wonder whether you have been
out in the January sales snapping up the bargains as part of your preparations
for Christmas 2015. Somehow I doubt it. Apart from the pressure upon the family
budget, few, if any of us, are that well organized to be prepared so far in
advance. Although we complain annually about the rush to get everything ready
for Christmas, we never really start planning for it until the last minute.
The strange thing is we do make preparations which are well in advance.
Most of us will try and sort out the summer holiday between November and
January, even though we may not be going until July or August of the following
year. All of us will have made some preparation for illness, if only by
registering with a doctor. Some of us will have made preparation for our
retirement, however far away that may seem at the present. In some way or other
we all appreciate the need to ‘be prepared’ – the former motto of the scouting
organization.
On this basis, I ask the question, ‘Are you prepared?’ The Bible gives
us the statement ‘Prepare to meet thy God’. Hence, are we prepared?
We may have made all sorts of resolutions as we entered 2015. We may
have been sincere and committed to make those resolutions work. I wonder how
many we have been able to keep for any length of time. How often we fail to
live up to our own targets, never mind live up to God’s standards! The only way
we can meet God is to be as perfect and holy as He is – not as a one-off,
should that be possible, but consistently and for all of our life! To see the
obvious, that we cannot hope to achieve that standard, is the starting point
that God wants us to come to. If we are serious about being prepared to meet
God, we need to start by seeing ourselves as God sees us!
If we are sinners, those who have failed to live as God would have us,
how can we prepare to meet God? The tremendous news is that God has already
prepared a way for us to meet Him on His terms. Some 2000 years ago Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, came to earth, lived a perfect life, and died upon a
Roman cross outside the city wall of Jerusalem. On that Roman cross, Jesus
Christ died to pay the penalty for your sin and mine! His death can be the
means of bringing new life to us – eternal life, the life of God. We have a
choice. We can put things off, prepare in our own way, or ignore the issue
altogether. Alternatively, we can come to God and confess that we are sinners
needing His salvation and trust in Jesus Christ as our personal Saviour.
Are you prepared?
