You, Me and Barabbas // The Price He Paid for You, Part 4

That first Easter was so incredibly unfair. Jesus – the innocent man – was crucified and Barabbas – the man guilty of murder – walked off Scott free. If you were God, would you have done things that way?

 

Let’s Tarry a While

It's interesting how when Easter passes us by we kind of quickly forget it and move on. It was a long weekend, it was a great time to have off and have a rest, have some chocolate. It comes, we eat chocolate, we have a long weekend, it goes, that's it, we move on, back to work, back to school, back to the empty house, whatever it is we do day after day and this week on the program and in fact over the coming three weeks we're going to dwell in Easter for a bit longer than just a long weekend. We're going to tarry and stay there a little bit longer.

And today's program is the first message in a series that I've called, "The Price He Paid For You" and as well as talking about Easter over the Easter period we're going to do the unthinkable and spend the next few weeks after Easter doing it as well. Can you believe that because it's a big thing this Easter thing? Not as a religious holiday, I don't mean that, I for one am definitely not into religion, it just doesn't work for me.

Not talking about religion, I'm talking about this big thing that God was up to at Easter. The thing that Jesus went through, the suffering, the persecution, the beating, the rejection and that death on the cross.

You and I are so incredibly special to God which is what makes you and me worth dying for. He's handcrafted us, He's made us, He's set us free in this amazing universe, always loving us but with the freedom He gave us a free will to accept Him or reject Him and when it comes right down to this, according to God, He made us, He loves us, He gave us free will and the point of all of that was for us to know Him and have this fantastic relationship with Him here and now and for all eternity.

But it doesn't matter which way we cut it each one of us in our own way we've rejected Him. I know I have, more often than we could ever imagine or count or recall and in doing that we miss the whole point. The whole point of creation, the whole point of life, the plan and the desire of God’s heart. When we turned our backs on God and we all have, we miss the whole point of life, that's exactly what the Greek word for "sin" actually means. It means to miss the mark or as we might say today to miss the point.

I know when I use the word "sin" people often write in or they call and say, "Come on, this is some kind of old fuddy-duddy concept, get with it Berni, get into today, sin just isn't relevant, it's something that priests or ministers talked about in the 1950's, get with it, it's old fashioned." I know, I know that some people think of sin that way but lets come back to Easter and the central point, the central problem of all creation is that we rejected God.

We turned our back on Him, it's hard to come to grips with. People say, 'Well I'm not a bad person, I'm not that bad, I'm okay' but let me ask you, from the moment you were old enough did you put God first? Was God always first in your life? Did you live your life as though you belonged to Him?

And the answer for all of us is, "No, we didn't." We've all done things; we've all turned away in our own way, in different ways; we've all turned our backs on God and at that Cross at a time that we now call Easter and we celebrate and we remember, on that cross God calls us home.

The consequences, what we should have paid for rejecting Him, were paid for by His Son Jesus; He died to give us a new life. Okay God calls us to a life of sacrifice, God calls us to a life of giving, He gives us a fresh new life, a wholesome life with real joy and because out of His great love He reached out to us through Jesus, He opens the door to a re