Time to Renew Your Subscription

If you have ever subscribed to a magazine, book club, or something similar, at some point you would receive a notice about renewing your subscription.  The notice would draw your attention to the original commitment you made and force you to make a decision about whether or not you wanted to continue. You might have even been given a choice to extend your commitment even further.

But, what does it actually mean to subscribe to something?  A few synonyms for "subscribe" are:  pledge, promise, and contribute.

When we first accepted God's gift of salvation and commited our lives to Jesus Christ, we, in essence, made a pledge, or promise, to contribute our heart, mind, soul and strength to God.  Most of us understood that our minimum pledge included attending worship and bible study regularly so we could learn and grow spiritually.

So,why is it that, after initially subscribing to worship and study regularly-- and enjoying the fruits of those activities--some of us simply let our subscription, our pledge expire?  Instead of letting it expire, we should be signing up for more! 

We should be adding daily prayer, quiet time with the Lord, outreach and missions, serving in a local church, learning about our spiritual gifts...whatever our hands find to do in the name of the Lord.

Instead of coming up with New Year's resolutions, some of us just need to blow the dust off of our old resolutions that we made when we first came to Jesus.  We need to return to our first love--to that moment we felt God's Holy Spirit nudging us to walk down that aisle or prompting us to give up something or someone standing in the way of our relationship with God.  We need to relive the moment that we truly said "Yes, Lord!" from the depths of our soul.

As we review our initial subscription and prepare to renew it, let's ask God to show us all of what our initial "yes" entailed.  There may be things in store for us that we were not ready to understand or receive in the beginning.  There may be more required of us than we were mature enough to perceive. 

The exciting thing is that, "He who began a good work in you will complete it until the day of Christ Jesus."  That means our subscription never really comes to an end, until the end.  None of us have "arrived" at all of who we are in Christ.  As long as we are living on this side of glory, we are all still in route and, as Maurette Brown Clark sings, "it ain't over until God says it's done."

So, if you are willing to continue pledging, promising and contributing to your relationship with God, consider this a friendly reminder that it's Time to Renew Your Subscription.

BNcouraged!

Rev. Karen