JESUS AND HIS SHOPPING SPREE

Shopping is surely the major emphasis of our days.  After all it IS December!

And...I love it.  I've always been enthralled with Christmas.

I begin October 1st.  We draw names at our office at that time.  I love it!

I love the crowds.  I love buying.  Aren't full parking lots encouraging?  I love giving and receiving.  Our office party is at noon Monday and I'll have my gift for Daniel in tow.

Something struck me this morning while studying something entirely of a different subject.  I began to wonder about Jesus and his shopping spree.

I thumbed to Isaiah 53 to read it again.

From the cross Jesus swept through villages, harbors, and countrysides buying up sinful garments of every color and size of every decade and century of every land and continent.  He bought angers, adulteries, persecutions, and laws.  He bought up all of the abusive words as well as matching detrimental actions. 

Jesus bought up supplies of hatred and bias and neglect and snobbery and robbery.  He purchased arguments, brokenness, mistakes, and heartaches.  He especially loved to buy up as many heartaches as he could find.

Jesus paid for it all only to wear our garments of sin on the cross.  He went out in our style; clothed in our sin, hoping that one day we would determine to be clothed in him through baptism. 

Jesus placed the Master Card on the public hill that we might one day understand we are free to realize that our sins have been purchased by his blood.  Nobody has ever gone on such a shopping spree.  It isn't yet over!  Such an extravagant spending spree lives on having bought up the ills of mankind....that mankind can receive the gift of salvation.

Thank you, Jesus, for being an obsessive shopper!