The Gospel Over and Over Again

A number of years ago I met a couple who had worked in Guyana with the International Justice Mission. And part of their role there in Guyana was working with a group a children who had been rescued out of slavery.

These children had been either abducted when they were young or born into a world where they were sold, used as labor in the fishing industry, or traded as commodities. The International Justice Mission there had set up an operation to rescue them and care for them—restore them to health, give them education and stability.

This couple told of what it was like for the kids after they had been rescued. That it took a very long time and a lot of repetition for it to hit home that they weren’t going to be abandoned again. That they weren’t going to be hit and abused again. That they didn’t have to steal and hoard food to make sure they could eat.

They found that one of the most effective things was to tell the kids, over and over and over again, the story of their rescue. That overtime the story of their rescue would anchor in their hearts and become the story that they could believe. They could be children and play and be loved. But they needed to keep coming back to that story, to when it happened.

I remember that striking me as a particularly powerful image of the Christian life. Jesus delivers us from our sin and shame. And this idea—that we can be forgiven of sin, that we can be transformed into people of hope in a hopeless world, that we can walk in the reality of being delighted-in daughters and sons of God who found our identity in the love of God—this story is too good to be true, right?

It’s easy for us to live like it isn’t true, living our lives taking our cues from other identities. To live our lives like we don’t belong to this family, like we aren’t empowered by the God who brings life to dead places. So we too need to keep coming back to this story—to hear told, to tell it ourselves, it inhabit it so that it becomes more and more real to us.

We should never feel shame for returning to the gospel of Jesus, as if maturity is moving on to something else. In fact, that’s the key to any true growth in the Christian life: to drink from the inexhaustible fountain of God’s love for us over and over again.

To know that because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we have forgiveness, transformation, and hope.

To know that we are God’s freed children.