Skip to main content

The Most Important Piece of the Puzzle

"Jesus answered him, "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise.""  Luke 23:43

Our family loves finding a good deal at a yard sale.  The closer we get to spring, the more antsy I get for a nice Saturday morning ride through all of the area subdivisions where the best yard sales are generally located.  You can really find some great deals going through people's junk!

Some years ago, my kids picked up one of those 500 piece puzzles at a yard sale -- you know, the ones that you typically get halfway done with and then lose interest because it's much more time consuming than you ever imagined!  Anyways, I was actually were impressed by our dedication to see it through.

However, I was devastated to discover that only 494 pieces appeared to be in the box.  You can only come to such a precise conclusion by coming to the end of the feat and being able to count the holes that were left in the beautiful picture of a scenic landscape, which now more resembles Swiss cheese than anything else.

I began to think about how closely this relates to life.  I've seen some wonderful people navigate through their years on this earth with obvious holes invading their life.  From a distance, everything seems to be perfectly fine.  But when you get closer and get to know them better, you can better see which pieces of their puzzle are missing.

Here are a few of the unfortunate missing pieces I've observed in people's lives:
  • Commitment to their family
  • Contentment in their career
  • Love, rather than hate
  • Peace, rather than anger
  • Fulfillment, rather than regret
As disappointing as it is to see someone come to the end of their journey with those kinds of things out of place, the most dangerous piece of the puzzle that someone can be missing is:

A Relationship with the Lord

The great thing is that we serve a God who doesn't discriminate against someone based on their age!  His arms are open and extended to anyone who calls on His Name, even if it's on their deathbed. 

Can I tell you the good side and the down side of a deathbed profession of faith?

The good thing is the obvious.  That person inherits eternal life in Heaven and when they die,  they will be ushered into the presence of the Lord, just as if they had been saved for fifty years!

The down side is this.  They have missed out on the beautiful blessing of having a relationship with the Lord while they were alive and well.  Their salvation is secure, but salvation is only part of the gift.  Going through life with God on your side is the other.

We see this played out perfectly when Jesus is on the cross and is being taunted by one of the robbers on the cross beside Him.  He tells Jesus to prove who He is by saving Himself and the two of them, too.  The other robber questioned whether or not he feared God because he knew that the two of them deserved to be hanging there because they were guilty of their crime, but Jesus however was innocent.

Because of that man's deathbed statement of faith in Christ, he was promised an eternity in Heaven by none other than Jesus Christ Himself.  He was probably merely hours away from seeing the gates of Hell, but within an instant, his eternity changed.

Isn't that great?  The only thing that would have been greater is if he would have had the joy of knowing Jesus in a personal way because of a relationship with him prior to his final moments on earth.

Friends, if we have people in our lives that are lost, don't wait for the possibility that they can turn things around right before it's too late.  Be urgent, be bold, and be diligent to share Jesus with them today. 

A relationship with Jesus is the most important piece of the puzzle. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Heartfelt Reflections of a Country Church

The smells, sounds, and people of country churches stir an emotion within me that is deep and powerful. For those who have never had the opportunity to experience this blessed experience, let me explain.   From the moment you step into the vestibule (never called a foyer in a rural church), you instantly smell the footsteps of every person who has crossed that threshold - the mother with a load of kids in tow, the farmer, the truck driver, the wayward child. If those paneled walls could talk, they would tell of grace and guilt and sorrow and joy that couldn’t be hidden on the faces of the souls that dared to cross that doorway. Those walls would write books of clinched fists, tears on the altar, and singing from the saints. The smell of the aged carpet, whose color may have caused an outright quarrel in a business meeting, the creak of the floor, and the golden memorial tags lead you to a nostalgic thing of days gone by - a pew, padded if you’re lucky.   As you wait for the ob...

I love my kids, BUT. . . .

"Schoolhouse Rock" was one of mine and my husband's favorite educational past times.  Bob Dorough, writer for "Schoolhosue Rock," was a genius when he put educational factoids to quirky music and cute cartoons.  From the preamble to the Constitution, to parts of speech, multiplication facts, how electricity works, and much more, Mr. Dorough slyly disguised learning and actually made it fun! Like all good parents, we passed this educational relic on to our kids.  One of our favorite songs from "Schoolhouse Rock" is without a doubt " Conjunction Junction ."  Its jazzy rhythm easily gets stuck in your head for the rest of your day ( sorry in advance! ).  This song teaches how conjunctions mechanically work in a sentence and what their purpose is.  The conjunction 'BUT' is one that we use all the time to connect two sentences or a clause to a sentence. "I like pizza,  BUT  I don't like olives on it." "I want to...

Taking the Mask Off

If I’ve learned anything over the last few weeks of wearing masks when going out in public, it’s that wearing a mask makes it hard to breathe.   The trapped air recirculating in and out gets thick and burdensome. The same is true for the invisible mask I wear on the days that I’m trying to hide the reality of what’s going on below the surface.   There comes a point when the air that has gotten trapped between my invisible mask and my unfortunate reality gets so heavy that ripping it off and gasping for a dose of fresh, life-giving oxygen is the only remedy.   ( Cue the proverbial mask selfie that everyone has had to take during quarantine. ) I think many of us frequently wear a mask, intentionally or unintentionally, to hide the reality of what’s underneath. We mask up to present a façade. A watered-down version of the true us. A suffocating misrepresentation of our current existence.  We’re all guilty.  One of my favorite person...