The Gift

Gift: defined as something received without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned.

When we returned from our Labor Day trip down to Port Arthur a few weeks ago, we had a gift waiting for us in our email inbox. A dear friend of ours sent us a note saying she had bought us a dinner a month for the next 6 months. Once a month, we get to click into the website and redeem the gift card to a choice of restaurants here in Fort Worth (we redeemed our September gift this week and will be trying Cordova’s Mexican restaurant very soon). We look forward to getting to pick out a different restaurant each month and will certainly remember our friends in doing so.

God also gave us another gift recently through some of our favorite people – FREE TICKETS TO SIX FLAGS!!!! We’ve talked about going when the weather gets a little cooler, but since it’s pretty pricy for our family of 5, we weren’t sure we were going to be able to swing it. Now, not only are we getting to go, but we’re going with friends whose hearts we adore.

Neither of these gifts we deserved. They were simply a free gift, given voluntarily. All we had to do was accept it. It reminds me of the ultimate gift that God makes available…to anyone willing to accept it. The gift of salvation that God made available through His Son is undeserved and cannot be earned. But in His mercy and grace, He offers it to us anyway. All we have to do is accept it.

As excited as we are about the gifts from our friends, it does not compare to the gift of eternal life. John 14:6 – Je$us answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”