Redeemer

Two cents, that was the redemption price of a soda bottle when I was a boy.  Very early on, before I even started going to school, I was in he redemption business.  I would scour the neighborhood, looking primarily in ditches along the roads for bottles caked with dirt, filled with dirty water and often extinguished cigarette butts.

The bottles were nasty, too dirty to even take to the country store across the road to get the redemption price.  Even after I cleaned them up and made the deal, they were not fully redeemed.  The owner of the store would turn them in to the soda distributor, who would take them back to the plant and fully cleanse them until they sparkled like new, free from contamination before completing the redemption process and filling them back up with soda to be returned to the store.

The bottles I dug up out of the ditches didn't look very appealing.  I can't imagine anyone thinking "What a lovely bottle, I think I'll fill it with something cool to drink."  In the condition I found them, they seemed to be worthless, something you would pass by with the same lack of value placed by the ones who threw them into the ditches.

But, despite their apparent worthlessness, I knew they had value.  I knew that the owner would buy them back and make them whole again.  I knew that there was a redeemer if only the bottles could be brought back to him, regardless of how dirty or foul or mud-caked they might have become - their was a redeemer.

We get in that condition.  Our lives are caked with sin.  We become filled with worldly contaminates. We appear to have lost any of our original value.  But their is a Redeemer, one who willingly pays the price to buy us back, who cleans us of every dark stain and returns us to our original state - cleaned out, filled up and returned to our rightful place.

This is the message I read this morning from the Book of Job that contains the narrative of a man who seemed to devalued and tossed upon a garbage heap, never to be reclaimed but not so: "I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes---I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" (19:25-27).

There is a Redeemer yet for you and me.  There is One who stands ready to make us whole, having paid the purchase price and prepared to cleanse us, fill us and return us to our original state.  His name is Jesus and he sees past all your sin and stain, sees the inherit value that comes from your Creator and desires to fully redeem you.  Jus' Say'n.