I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in Him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 15:13
I have seen the saying, “Love is how happy your dog gets when you get home,” and I am inclined to agree with this saying. I love my dog, and I think she loves us too. Actually though, I think she would love anyone who fed her.
Our dog is a Red Lab named Rosie. Greeting me with enthusiasm is not the only thing she does with great excitement. To Rosie, all of life is one big adventure. A tennis ball? “Woohoo!” To her this is an exciting event! She wildly runs in search of the tennis ball, finds it and brings it to me. I throw it and she gets to retrieve it. What fun! In Rosie’s world, life just doesn’t get better than this . . . well, possibly breakfast and dinner—but it’s close!
There are many times in the course of the day that she gets all wound up. She looks at me with her big mouth open in a smile and every time I take a step, she takes a little leap. She just can’t control herself. I could understand this excitement if we were getting ready to go for a walk or a car ride, but we’re not! Often times, I am a wet blanket and tell Rosie there is nothing to be excited about. Nothing. She usually doesn’t believe me and stays excited for a little bit until, true to my word, nothing exciting happens and she decides to take a nap—just a short say two hours or so?
I was thinking about this and it seems that much of the time we do the exact inverse of how Rosie is in her excitement for life when it comes to our faith. Here we are with direct access to the Creator of the Universe any time we want and we barely take time to speak to Him in prayer. We get to go to church and worship and sing praise to the One who sent His Son to die for us and we act like it is a chore. In short, we act like there is no Good News, and nothing to be excited about when in fact there is everything to be excited about!
Now I am not suggesting that we run around our whole lives on some superficial high—that’s not realistic—but I am suggesting that we need to realize the magnitude of what Jesus did for us when He willingly laid down His life for us. My Pastor stated a while ago that we have had the best news ever delivered to us and we act like its bad news. We are afraid to tell people about our faith for the backlash that could occur. We act like Jesus dying on the cross for us and saving us from eternal damnation wasn’t a big deal. We act like there is nothing to be excited about. But there is!
Because of Jesus’s death on the cross you, me, and anyone who chooses to believe does not have to suffer eternally. Through the Holy Spirit we have a helper and an intercessor. Because of who God is we always have a friend to talk to, to cry to, and to be excited with throughout all of life’s ups and downs. We have every reason to be excited, so maybe we should act like it. Maybe we need to be like Rosie and instead of bemoaning how different everything could be, we need to approach the little things in life like the adventure they are. Maybe we need to approach life more with the unbridled joy with which Rosie approaches life.
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