How Full Is YOUR Bottle?

I was walking with a friend this morning and we were talking about God. "Well done my good and faithful servant ..." is what we hope to hear when we finally stand at the feet of our Lord. We both agreed that the minute we accept the Lord as our Saviour, we are saved. We must then walk close to God so that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit and be led to do "good works" on earth as Christ did when He was here.

We both also agreed that the only way to walk close to God is to read, study and understand His word - the Bible. We then continued to walk in contemplative silence.

I suddenly had this image of each one of us walking around clutching huge bottles to our chest. We are each given a bottle when we accept Christ and become a Christian. Each bottle has a few seeds in it. We then go through life holding on to this bottle and each time we follow Christ's examples of loving our enemies or speaking a kind word or doing a kind deed, a few more seeds get dropped into our bottle. So also when we are obedient to God and follow the direction of the Spirit.

More seeds are dropped in when we trust and obey the Lord; when we attend Sunday services with an open mind, a receptive heart and a sincere spirit; when we are slow to anger; when we use gentle words to calm an angry person; when we reach out to those difficult to love ... when we make an effort to follow the teachings in the Bible and try again and again to be Christ-like ... we gather more seeds into our bottles.

When we finally meet our Lord, we will kneel before Him with our bottles in hand. Question is - how full will your bottle be? Half filled? Full? Or only with those few seeds that were deposited when you accepted the Lord?

The comforting thought is that those first few seeds will never get taken away no matter what. Neither the bottle! Once we declare that Christ is our Saviour, our Messiah, nobody can take that bottle away from us. Neither can we throw that bottle away. It stays with us till we finally meet God.

What will God say after He says, "Well done, my good and faithful servant ..."? And how full will our bottles be? I hope to present Him with a full bottle. Amen.