1 John 3:1
The
season is approaching when young wealthy teenagers are thrown extravagant
parties to showcase their coming of age. Tens of thousands of dollars are spent
putting on an event that many of them don’t want and certainly don’t deserve.
They are rebellious teenagers just like the rest of us. Quinceañera, Sweet
Sixteen, and Débutante Balls are all about
expending wealth on someone who hasn’t earned the right to such extravagance.
They are really about showcasing the wealth of the family to other wealthy socially
well connected families.
This kind of lavish
expense is not always the best thing for a young person to experience.
Especially in our society today, when selfishness is being perfected as an art
form, we need to bring back a sense non-entitlement. Society doesn’t owe us.
The government doesn’t owe us a paycheck, rent subsidies, food stamps, welfare,
or medical care.
We are the ones who own
the debt. We owe our parents for providing for us as we grew up. We owe society
for the schools, police, running water, roads, malls, electricity, and climate
control. We owe the government something for providing a relatively safe
environment without too much violence and destruction.
We are the ones who owe
God. We broke His commands. We violated His laws. We chose to go our own way.
His rights to obedience were flaunted. We shook our fits at Him in anger and despair.
We turned our backs on His overtures of invitation to reconciliation. We ran
away.
And yet John tells us
in our text that His love has been lavished on us. He poured it out on those
who have no right to demand it. He extravagantly spent His capital, His own
innocent life given on the cross, to throw us a party to welcome us back after
our rebellion. He makes us part of His family, not because we worked really
hard to become acceptable, but despite our total ineptness at pleasing Him.
But He does more than
just call us His children, slapping a fancy label on a cheap bottle of wine. He
actually makes us His children through adoption. This isn’t some second class
family members who eat in the back room on leftovers. This is the family that
sits in the banquet room and is served by the angels of heaven. When we become
Jesus-followers we begin to be served the best that the Creator of the Universe
has to offer, both in this life and in the next. We can experience life as it
was meant to be lived. Joy takes on extra shades of heightening. Everything we
were designed to be now becomes possible, even in the fallen world in which we
live.