When Jesus plucks us out of our own ashes, he doesn’t expect perfection—he has already attained that on our behalf (2 Cor. 5:21). We have died with Christ, and he will raise us to life. He has purchased our right-standing with God. Still, he does want to change us, little by little, to love sin less and to desire him more.

The light was dim in my bedroom that night. I knelt, face-down, the fibers of the carpet tickling my nose. The world felt like it was shrinking around me to contain only this room, this moment. I had been blind for so many years, living—no, relishing—in sin. I chased it and held it near to me like my favorite pet. But that night the veil was lifted, and my sin was exposed before me. No longer could I take cover under the guise of being a “good person.”
Tears dropped to the floor as conviction crumbled the hardness of my heart. It was in this crumbling of everything I thought I knew that Jesus found me. As I was pursuing sin, he was unrelenting in his pursuit of me. This was my “go and sin no more” moment. In a blink of an eye, my worldview shifted in alignment with the God who created me, and the trajectory of my whole life changed.
He sought me, he saved me, and there was no way he wouldn’t change me.
A Woman and a Trap
There’s another woman whose life held a similar story. She was merely a pawn in their game—a test and a trap for the Lord Jesus Christ. The scribes and Pharisees discovered her sin of adultery and decided to use it to make a point. To them, her life meant nothing. They didn’t care if she lived or died. Dragging her into the middle of the crowd where Jesus was, they said, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” (John 8:4–5).
Scripture doesn’t tell us how this nameless woman felt as she stood in front of these men with their threatening looks. Perhaps she was bowed down with the weight of her shame and terrified as she seemingly stared death in the face. Maybe she was imagining what was to come, already dreading the sharp stones striking her flesh. Would God be gracious enough to let one hit her in the temple, ending her life quickly, or would she experience a slow, pelting death? Did she feel utterly hopeless?
The woman waited for the verdict as Jesus wrote something in the dirt with his finger. The Pharisees and scribes kept asking him until finally he silenced them saying, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7).
In pretending to care about the law and holiness, these men exposed their hard and darkened hearts. They sought to catch Jesus and find him guilty; instead, he caught them. One by one he exposed their sin, and each of them walked away (John 8:9).
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Picture the sinless Savior willingly submitting himself to God to be born into our sinful world, coming to save those who spurned his name. What love is this? Only the love of Jesus. Only he would take off his crown and robe, replacing them with human flesh and a crown of thorns. He left glory to save us. The Hope of heaven came down for you.

I saw the flashing blue lights against the dark night long before I neared them. I began making my way over to the next lane of the busy highway and glanced in the direction of the cop cars—there must have been at least ten—to decipher the cause of all this chaos. There weren’t any crushed cars or breakage along the road. What happened? I wondered. And then I saw.
A body, covered in a bloody white sheet. My heart picked up speed, my whole body succumbed to numbness, and my lips involuntarily repeated a lament to God: “Oh God. Oh God!” I was shaken.
Maybe having access to stories like this in the news every day has made me a bit numb to reality, but seeing a tragic death with my own pupils jarred me. I thought about the family of that person and prayed for them. Gripping the steering wheel, I was suddenly aware of how dangerous it was to drive a car. I thought about what my children would do if it were me under that sheet, or their father, my sweet husband. The person under that sheet could have been me and it could have been you. Life truly is a vapor.
When faced with reminders that death will eventually come for each of us, some people brush it off, refusing to think deeply about something that seems far away. Others might start to think about the afterlife. As Christians, we know the truth that every human will either die in his or her sin and go to a literal place called Hell or they will die hidden in Christ and be brought safely into Heaven.
The season of Advent is a sweet time of pondering Jesus’s birth. We gently place a star on the tip of our decked-out tree like the star that hung in the sky around the time he was born (Matt. 2:9). The twinkly lights remind us that the light of life has come to men (John 1:4). The red, green, and plaid wrapped packages point us to the gift given to us by God (John 3:16). But the birth of Jesus should also lead our minds to celebrate and reflect on the truth that he came to annihilate death.
The Hope of Heaven. . .
A while back, my husband and I read Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven. It left me awestruck about what’s to come for those of us who are in Christ.
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