The season is approaching when young wealthy teenagers are thrown extravagant parties to showcase their coming of age. Tens of thousands of dollars are spent putting on an event that many of them don’t want and certainly don’t deserve. They are rebellious teenagers just like the rest of us. Quinceañera, Sweet Sixteen, and Débutante Balls are all about expending wealth on someone who hasn’t earned the right to such extravagance. They are really about showcasing the wealth of the family to other wealthy socially well connected families.
This kind of lavish expense is not always the best thing for a young person to experience. Especially in our society today, when selfishness is being perfected as an art form, we need to bring back a sense non-entitlement. Society doesn’t owe us. The government doesn’t owe us a paycheck, rent subsidies, food stamps, welfare, or medical care.
We are the ones who own the debt. We owe our parents for providing for us as we grew up. We owe society for the schools, police, running water, roads, malls, electricity, and climate control. We owe the government something for providing a relatively safe environment without too much violence and destruction.
We are the ones who owe God. We broke His commands. We violated His laws. We chose to go our own way. His rights to obedience were flaunted. We shook our fits at Him in anger and despair. We turned our backs on His overtures of invitation to reconciliation. We ran away.
And yet John tells us in our text that His love has been lavished on us. He poured it out on those who have no right to demand it. He extravagantly spent His capital, His own innocent life given on the cross, to throw us a party to welcome us back after our rebellion. He makes us part of His family, not because we worked really hard to become acceptable, but despite our total ineptness at pleasing Him.
But He does more than just call us His children, slapping a fancy label on a cheap bottle of wine. He actually makes us His children through adoption. This isn’t some second class family members who eat in the back room on leftovers. This is the family that sits in the banquet room and is served by the angels of heaven. When we become Jesus-followers we begin to be served the best that the Creator of the Universe has to offer, both in this life and in the next. We can experience life as it was meant to be lived. Joy takes on extra shades of heightening. Everything we were designed to be now becomes possible, even in the fallen world in which we live.
The Arnold Journey 