Picture yourself walking down the street with your sweetheart. You've got 50 bucks in your pocket and your looking for a reasonable priced place to eat. You come to an exclusive restaurant where you know you would have to spend $200 or more to eat. As you are about to move on, the maitre d comes out and invites you to come in and enjoy dinner for two, compliments of the restaurant. The normal, usual, expected way to have such a meal would be to pay for it. You might just move on because the whole thing sounds suspect. Having a free high class restaurant experience bestowed on you is unexpected and hard to wrap your head around. Instead of moving on you decide to proceed cautiously knowing you've got your 50 bucks to fall back on.
We are used to paying our way and are very suspicious of free gifts. This is the same struggle many have with God. Caught up in the syndrome of trying to pay our own way by following a religious system, we are suspicious when we hear about the gospel of grace. And even after we do go forward in good faith with God and the gospel of grace we have our 50 bucks to fall back on. Perhaps it is because our propensity to pay our own way runs so deep that Jesus uses the additional illustration above. Again, he drives home the point that the old and the new are incompatible. Whether we are outside the restaurant contemplating the offer of a free high dining experience or we are already in the middle of it, there is no place for our 50 bucks. The Romans passage above helps us to understand that our place at the table is secure. How silly of us to seek security in the paltry contents of our own wallets. We are at the table because the one who loves us invited us to be there, he paid the bill entirely, and nothing will ever remove us from the fabulous "table" of his presence.
Read again the words of the Luke and Hebrews passages above in this light. Let the assurance God's Spirit is waiting to bring to you sweep over your soul and be assured that the gospel of grace really is the gospel of grace alone with no strings attached. The Colossians passage tells us what to do with the voices of those who want to take away our assurance and security in Christ. Christ is our reality, not their religious system of rules and regulations, so we don't let their shadows of reality mess with the full reality of Christ and the gospel of grace.
Lord, thank you for making it possible for me to be at your table. Thank you for inviting me to it and seating me there. And thank you for the assurance that I am at the table of your presence forever. Guard my heart and mind from my own tendency to want to "mix" in "pay my own way" stuff with the gospel of grace. Please, guard me from the voices of others that beckon me back to finding security through rules and regulations. My trust is in you and you alone, Lord. Your gracious and loving presence are all I need.