REDEMPTION

My seventeen-year-old son works at Kroger. He recently got promoted from being a cart pusher to a checkout artist or whatever they title people that work the cash register. I call him a checkout artist because I watched him checking out a young lady while adding up her groceries. He didn’t know I was checking him out though. We had to have a talk.

Anyway he tells me really funny stories because like his old man, he talks to everybody and pays attention to things.

Not long ago several people were in line at the supermarket when he noticed the rather attractive lady behind some guy cautiously wanted to get his attention. The guy was a little surprised and his wife had just left to get something she had forgotten. So he looks around to see if his wife is coming back yet and says, “Hey, don’t we know each other, I think we’ve met, maybe?”

She replies, “I may be mistaken, but I thought you might be the father of one of my kids.”

Ben said the guy’s blood left his face and suddenly in a very hurried voice said, “Look, my wife is going to come back here in a minute and I don’t want to talk about this now. But you’ve got to know, when I got out of the police station I went back to the hotel room and you had gone, I swear.”

“No,” she replies with disgust, “I'm your son's English teacher”.

The Getaway
Nobody really gets away with anything. I mean we think we do but we really don’t. It’s always out there trying get back to us. That’s why we need redemption.

Did you see the movie with Harrison Ford called the Fugitive? A great movie where you really root for the guy because number one, you know he is innocent and number two, you want to see somebody get away. People can’t help but be attracted to a guy on the run. Remember OJ in the white Bronco with a hundred police cars behind him. All those dummies running out to the highway holding up signs, “RUN OJ RUN”

Though he isn’t the least bit Scottish, OJ got off Scott-free for the horrible murder of his wife and the other guy. It’s just the hand of the Lord that 13 years latter, to the day he was found guilty for another crime. No doubt ending his 13-year search for the real killer on golf courses everywhere. OJ got away, but he didn’t find redemption.

Still there is something intriguing about people escaping out of terrible places. Some year’s back a movie came out called The Shawshank Redemption where a man escaped from a terrible prison. People will pay big money to set through two hours of horrible prison scenes if they think that the last five minutes of the movie will show his escape. There is just something about a man escaping from bondage that you can’t help but like.

Redemption is all about escaping terrible bondage. Shawshank or not, I love redemption.

Redemption can also be a do-over. I think God is in the do over business and loves to give us third and fourth chances; or however many times we need to get things right. For instance, the Bible says a guy named Peter stood by a fire and because he was overwhelmed by terrible circumstances, said he didn’t know Jesus three different times in a row. Not long after, Jesus took that same guy to another fire and asked him three different times if he loved him. He reset the whole scenario for Peter’s success.

The only difference was that this time Peter was overwhelmed by the presences of God instead of by the circumstances.

So if you find yourself having to go through a do-over, it might be the Lord setting you up for success where you’ve always failed before. That’s how redemption works. This time I hope you can find yourself overwhelmed by God’s goodness instead of the junk you are having to deal with.

Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake.
Psalms 44:26

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