The Road Less Traveled , by Scott Peck was a hugely popular best seller in the United States and around the world in the 1980’s and 1990’s. First published in 1978, the opening words of the book are, “Life is difficult.” All of Dr. Peck’s observations and suggestions about life on earth spring from this defining sentence. Its simplicity was admired and often quoted, as it is impossible to imagine a human life that has not encountered at least some difficulties.

“But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy but now you have received mercy. ” ( 1 Peter 2:9&10)

The difficulties of life are certainly many and varied and real, but the Holy Spirit of God has poured out through Peter a definition that transcends all others: You are redeemed as a person of God. Human beings have received redemption by the death and resurrection of His son Jesus. Human life is redeemed, set right with God, in order to receive the Holy Spirit of God into our own lives. It is God’s desire. It was His plan from before the Fall, and it has worked in the lives of countless Christians for millennium.

The crippling effect of guilt consciousness, and even sub-conscious guilt has been lifted by the redemption that Christ has delivered to us. The power of such a shift in reality can’t even be measured. It conveys a freedom and a strength that is not accessible from any other source. It is celebrated today for forty days of Lent culminating in the great celebration of Easter.

It’s easy today to cast about in our ubiquitous technologies in order to access specialists and communicators to find hundreds of paths to happiness on earth. Most of them overlap one another, but they all claim that changes in our behavior can reap great rewards and “rescue” us from all the things that distress us. But God has done something without even consulting us, in sending His own Person literally to take our place in dying, and in being raised again, so that we, too, could share His supernatural life, and become genuine members of His family. “All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:6-7). Life, created by God, is redeemed by God. We are His.

Love in Him,

Prue