My Mother’s Christmas Bank Account
I grew up in a poor family and my mother saved in an actual bank account all year long so that we could have gifts under the Christmas tree. More than any other time in the year, except maybe my birthday, I felt loved.
My mom’s efforts to save money for gifts for three children seemed to indicate love and security.
I didn’t realize as I grew up that my mom’s efforts actually contributed to an unhealthy perspective about God—that He required my efforts so that He could love me. I didn’t know what to call this spiritual perspective at the time but I became a perfectionist. That meant I believed God was waiting for me to become perfect so that He could love me and admit me into heaven after I died. I had a mental image of a scale of justice which kept track on one side my good deeds and on the other my bad deeds. I hoped there would be more good deeds than bad on my scale when I died so that I could be approved by God to enter heaven.
Then on October 1st, 1967, at the age of eighteen, I heard clearly for the first time that I could never earn my way into heaven—but God had provided through His efforts—His work.
On that beautiful morning at a little church in Norwalk, California, a pastor explained to me for the first time that entrance came, not from piling good deeds on a particular side of my spiritual scale, but depending upon Jesus’ perfect sacrifice for my sins on the cross of Calvary. Such beautiful news! I prayed to receive Jesus as my Savior and Lord.
Two months later, on my first Christmas after becoming saved, I enjoyed celebrating Jesus’s birth with a new heart and a new understanding.
Jesus didn’t come to earth to examine my life and require perfection, but was born a human who was the only being who would perform perfectly. Only then would He be the perfect substitute for the sins of the world. I again recognized I could never achieve total purity. But that God saw me as perfect because I depended upon Jesus’s death and resurrection for my spiritual standing before a holy God (Hebrews 10:14).
I’m grateful for my mother’s faithful efforts to provide gifts for us children. But I’m more grateful that my spiritual gifts in my standing as God’s child doesn’t require me becoming perfect. Jesus’s perfect life from the moment of His birth guarantees He is the perfect substitute for me.
