Living a Happy Life: A 7-Day Devotional for Parents About Living From Acceptance—Not for AcceptanceSample

Day Two: The Great Exchange

When we think we can be good enough to earn God’s love, we offend God. Because if we could be good enough to get God to love us, then God sent Jesus, His Son, to die for us for no reason. But God did not send Jesus to die on the cross for no reason! Jesus died for us because we can never earn our way to God. The reason is that God is pure and holy—more pure and holy than we could ever imagine. Because God is so holy, He cannot tolerate sin. He cannot coexist with sin, which is really bad news for us because all of us have sinned. All of us have fallen short of God. 

Yet God loves us so much. 

He longs to forgive us and cleanse us of our sin. Because of His great love for us, at the perfect time in history, God sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins. The Bible teaches that when Jesus died for us, an amazing and shocking thing happened for those of us who believe in Jesus. All our sins were put on Jesus, and the perfection of Jesus was put on us. For a long time, people who studied the Bible called the moment of Jesus’ death “The Great Exchange.”

Jesus makes a great exchange with those of us who believe in Him. He takes all our sins and places them on Himself, and He gives us His perfect record. For those of us who believe, not only are all our sins gone, but we also now have all the goodness of Jesus. God looks at us as if we are perfect, as if we lived the life Jesus lived. 

In the story The Quokkas, The Snails, and the Land of Happiness, the Quokkas have full sticker charts. Everyone who is a Christian has a full “spiritual sticker chart” too—not because we earned any of the stickers (we can’t earn them!) but because Jesus has given us all the stickers. Our charts are always filled because of Jesus!