Read: John 19:28-30

Evan breathed deeply through his nose as he walked into the kitchen. “Yum!” he said, walking over to where his older sister was working. “Lemon pie!”

“Oh no, you don’t!” said Zoe, shooing him away with her spatula. “This is nowhere near finished.”

“Okay, but I’ll be waiting for it,” Evan said, then headed upstairs to do homework. When he came back later, Zoe had poured the filling into the pie shell. “Can I have some pie now?” he asked.

Zoe shook her head. “It’s still not finished,” she told him. “It’s lemon meringue pie, and it doesn’t have any meringue on it yet.”

Evan checked back one more time before dinner. “It’s finished now,” Zoe told him, “but you can’t have any yet. I baked it for dessert tonight.”

After dinner, Zoe finally brought the pie to the table. Evan scooped up and swallowed every bit on his plate. “Now the pie’s really finished,” he said, patting his stomach. “It’s all gone.”

For devotions that night, Dad read from the Gospel of John. “‘It is finished.’ Those were the last words Jesus said on the cross,” Dad said, closing his Bible. “Sounds a lot like some of the words being said in the kitchen this afternoon. A couple of times I overheard Zoe tell Evan that the lemon pie wasn’t finished yet. Finally, she said it was finished, but even then it didn’t do Evan any good. Why not?”

“Because I didn’t eat any of it,” replied Evan. “Her fault, not mine!”

“I don’t doubt it,” Dad said with a smile. “Well, Jesus came to earth to take the punishment for our sin. On the cross, He finally said, ‘It is finished.’ His work was done. But a lot of people are missing the full benefit of His finished work. Why?”

“Because they haven’t trusted Him as their Savior,” Zoe said after a moment.

“Right,” said Dad. “To enjoy the finished pie, we had to take it for ourselves and eat it. And to enjoy the benefit of Jesus’s finished work—the joy and peace of having a relationship with God that lasts for eternity—we have to receive it for ourselves. We have to believe in Jesus and trust Him to save us to become a child of God.”

–Hazel W. Marett

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