Can I Pay For You?

If you had a deadly disease that you knew was going to kill you any minute, would you want a cure?  Perhaps you heard that the medicine shop in town had the cure.  You go there in a hurry to get it.  You rush into the shop and ask the shopkeeper if he has the cure.  You are very happy when you hear him say “yes.”  You ask him to give you some and he tells you, “It is very expensive.  Have you got enough money?”

“Yes,” you reply.  “I will give everything I have if necessary.  How much does it cost?”

“Well, it is a very rare cure.  It costs more than 1,000,000,000 dollars”, he tells you as he places it on the counter in front of you.

“1,000,000,000 dollars?  Are you sure?” you ask.  “That is very expensive,” you think to yourself.  You begin to lose hope.  You start to think, “I can never pay that price.  I will die.  There is nothing I can do.”

Suddenly, there is another man in the shop who comes to you and asks if he can help?  You never saw him before.  He looks at you with love in his eyes.  He asks, “Can I buy the cure for you and give it to you as a gift?”

“Do you have enough money?” asks the shopkeeper.

“Yes, I do.  It is everything I have, but it is enough,” he tells him.  He takes out the money and places it on the counter to give to the shopkeeper.

You are surprised and amazed.  You think, “Who is this man?  How can he pay so great a price?  Why does he want to pay for me?”

He knows what you are thinking and tells you, with a tear in his eye, “I love you.  Can I please pay for you?  I want to help you.”

The shopkeeper does not care who gives him the money.  He only needs to have the debt paid before he allows the cure to leave his shop.  The man wants to pay for you.  Suddenly they both look at you.  The shopkeeper asks you, “Is it OK with you if this man pays for you?”

The decision is yours.  You must make a choice.  You think, “to accept this man’s love and payment is to have life.  To not accept his love and payment is to have death”.

In this little story, God the Father is like the shopkeeper, God the Son (Jesus) is like the man who wants to pay for you, and you are the one with the deadly disease of sin.  You must make a choice.

This is the same choice that Adam faced.  It is a choice between life and death.  Actually, it is a choice between eternal life and eternal death.  Today, you have a choice to make.  You will chose to obey, love, trust, and accept God; or, you will chose to disobey, hate, rebel, and deny God.  You will choose eternal life or eternal death.  What will you do?