Read
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23
Reflect
When my daughter was six years old she got extremely sick. Throughout the night she became severely dehydrated and was running a very high temperature, and we were advised to take her to the emergency room.
I remember carrying her limp little frame from the house to the car and from the car into the hospital. Once inside, we had to wait in the children’s waiting room for them to get a bed for her, and it was so difficult to watch her suffering while she tried to rest on a couple of chairs. Finally, we were given a room in the ER and we sat with her while they ran tests.
But that wasn’t the end of her troubles. This is when we found out that she was allergic to penicillin after they gave her antibiotics to fight whatever infection was inside. As she had an adverse reaction to the medicine, we realized that we thought would be a solution suddenly became part of a different problem.
We spent most of the night in the hospital, and fortunately, she began to improve, but along the way, we felt incredibly helpless. We were her parents, yet we felt entirely powerless and unable to do anything to help her. It’s amazing that, even though these things happened close to 20 years ago, I can still remember it all like it was yesterday.
It’s incredible to think that our Father God also had pain when He looked down on humanity as it suffered in weakness and sin, but realized that He had no place to turn but to Himself. He knew that the only solution was the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ, so He sent Jesus to be our solution for sin and death. But even then, as a father, God had to watch as His Son suffered and died as our remedy. That’s a level of agony I simply cannot imagine, but I’m so thankful that the Lord was willing to sacrifice so that we could live.
Today, if you’re a parent, remember that you have a heavenly Father who understands your struggles and pains not only because He made you, but because He’s been there Himself. But even for those who aren’t parents, we can all give thanks for the sacrifice that the Father and the Son made on our behalf.
Reflection copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt and Charles Fulton.
