“Our benefits package”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Meditation – Sunday, March 12, 2023
Romans 5:1-11 (Forward, p. 42) CEV p. 1176
The benefits package: this wasn’t something that even entered my mind when I signed on to full time employment with either the provincial government or with the Anglican Church. I was simply happy to have employment. However, I understand from my reading that this question is very much on the minds of many new employees these days.
Well, today’s passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans explains something of the ‘benefits package’ that we have by virtue of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ:
a) We are acceptable to God. We no longer have to feel the pressure, the compulsion to measure up, to be ‘good enough’. Through the grace, the free unmerited favour of Jesus Christ, we are accepted as we are, warts and all;
b) We live at peace with God. While we were once outsiders, and, indeed rebels, enemies towards God, all of that enmity and separation is now done away with through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Christ, by His death, has done away with the curse and the penalty of all sin, ours included and has totally forgiven us, as if none of this had ever happened;. Our sin is gone, forever, forgotten and erased, and so too is our guilt and our shame;
c) We have a security, a firm standing with God, based on Jesus Christ and on Him alone, and nothing can remove us from that;
d) We are happy, not just because of the new life that we now enjoy and also because of the glory that we will one day share with Christ;
e) We have a hope that is far more than mere ‘wishful thinking’, a hope that has substance, a real basis, a hope for the future that will never disappoint us.
I don’t think that many of us ‘sign on’ with Jesus in order to gain this ‘benefits package’, but there it is, anyway. What it should do, nevertheless, is to make us all the more grateful to Him, all the more thankful, and, of course, all the more ready and willing to obey Him and do His will. Amen.
Forward notes: “But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (verse 11).
“The Hebrew children complain to Moses because they have run out of water [see Exodus 17:1-7]. God has freed them from Egyptian tyranny, but apparently, they don’t trust God to supply the water. They argue with Moses, who seems frustrated with their complaints. Still, Moses takes their case to God, not out of thirst but rather by the threat of being stoned.
“Jesus is thirsty, too, so he asks the Samaritan woman for water from the well [see John 4:5-42]. She argues with Jesus, but she is inquisitive rather than quarrelsome or plaintive.
“What I don’t understand is why Moses—and by extension, God—becomes so upset when the people express a human need. I’ve argued with God over far less, and all I’ve experienced in return is enormous grace, just like the Samaritan woman, who receives grace upon grace.
“This is why I like to highlight today’s reading from Romans, which reminds us that grace fills us with a joyful trust in God. Isn’t that what God sought from the Hebrew children in the first place and what baffled God when they responded otherwise?”
MOVING FORWARD: “Do you often argue with God? How can you embrace joyful trust?”
A concluding note: Unfortunately, today’s author, in describing the contrast between God’s treatment of Israel in the wilderness and His treatment of us now, forgets the central theme and message of this passage from Romans. Our rebellion, our murmuring, is overlooked, forgotten, glossed over, only because of what Christ has done for us, only because of His full, unmerited, undeserved favour, as shown in His life, death and resurrection.