“Why do you religious people always try to rob us of our pleasures?” asked a young man while talking with a Christian woman.
“You are so mistaken,” she answered. “I don’t want you to give up anything—I want you to receive.”
On his way home the words kept ringing in his head: “I don’t want you to give up; I want you to receive.”
Try as he would, he could not forget them. Night and day he kept repeating to himself, “Receive . . . give up.”
At last he admitted to himself: “I would not be surprised if these Christians have the best of it after all. Maybe they do have something which I have not. What are the things I could not give up? What does she want me to receive?”
Finally he went back to his Christian friend. He told her how unhappy he had become, and asked her to tell him what it was he was to “receive.”
“Your whole life has been one long attempt to find satisfaction in things that cannot satisfy you,” she told him. “God wants you to receive from Him that which can satisfy. When you have received what God gives, you will be glad to give up the empty things.”
She explained to him from the Bible that Jesus Christ alone can give satisfaction and peace and rest to the hungry heart, and that when Christ is received by simple faith, the “pleasures of sin” lose their appeal.
God would have you know that He loves you—that He so loved you as to give His only Son to die for your sins—that you might not perish but have everlasting life. (See John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16).)
Why not receive God’s priceless gift, which is Jesus Christ, now?
“I [Jesus] am come
that they might have life,
and that they might have it
more abundantly.”