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"Into your hands I commit my spirit; You have ransomed me, O LORD, God of truth." --Psalm 31:5 As I was reading Psalm 31 in my devotional time today, this verse reminded me of a speaker that I heard just last week at our church district's annual missions convention. One of the speakers was the son of a Nazarene missionary who had been kidnapped and held hostage for 2 weeks in December 1995. The kidnappers were holding him for ransom, hoping that the Church of the Nazarene's international headquarters would give several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for this missionary's safe return. The Church of the Nazarene, however, has a no-ransom policy, and for good reason. You see, exchanging ransom for one missionary would automatically put the lives of all the several hundred other Nazarene missionaries around the world in instant danger since other groups could catch wind of it and do the same thing elsewhere. God answered the prayers of his people, and this missionary was rescued by local authorities and had his life spared. We read in the Bible, however, that all of us are held hostage by sin and death and hopelessness. God is a holy and just God who simply cannot accept sin from His people. But God loved us so much that, as the verse above says, he paid the ransom for us to release us from bondage to sin. That sin still had to be answered for; the ransom had to be paid. So God paid the ultimate price to ransom us from our sin. He sent his one and only Son, Jesus, to die for our sin. Jesus himself said in Matthew 20:28, "The Son of Man [meaning himself] did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." My friend, God made the ultimate sacrifice for you. He gave the most valuable thing He had so that you might know His saving grace; He gave His Son. Such an enormous ransom price deserves nothing less than our complete gratitude and devotion. Today, if you have not asked God to forgive you for your sins, you are still being held hostage to sin and death, and the Bible says that the wages of sin is death. Ask God to forgive you for your sins, to make you clean, and to allow the Lord Jesus Christ, who is risen from the dead, to be in control of all your life. And if you are already a follower of Jesus Christ, would you take a moment again to thank God for paying the ultimate ransom for your life? --Pastor Joel
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