Every year, my Catholic school did a magazine subscription drive, and we had a pep rally to get very excited about the prizes we could win for being top sellers.
This mostly included ornately decorated pompoms with googly eyes called “weepuls.” Some of mine even had peel and stick feet so that I could stick them to my backpack.
Don’t worry. This article will not be asking you to purchase a magazine subscription. I am turning forty-two this week, and I found myself lamenting the explosion of subscriptions in my world today.
I have to subscribe to my favorite youtube channels, podcasts, and substack writers in addition to my word processor, meal planner, and grocery items.
And every subscription promises some kind of reward that amounts to nothing, like a weepul pompom to stick to my backpack. Every subscription also promises to make me the kind of person who subscribes to Netflix, Prepdish, or Well-Watered Woman, just like magazine subscriptions used to define a purchaser’s identity as a sports fan, a woman, or an old person.
The Old Testament sacrificial system was also somewhat of a subscription service. Sinners had to repeatedly offer lambs, rams, bulls, birds, or heifers to pay for their sins. The writer to the Hebrews says, “In these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year… and every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.”
Sometimes, when I think of my own sin, I have the strong desire to subscribe to whatever activity I need to in order to compensate for it. I want to be the kind of person who is known as a “good person.” I would like to identify as someone who subscribes to Holiness Weekly or Squeaky Clean. If it’s a bull yearly, a ram monthly, a lamb weekly, or a turtledove daily, sign me up.
I want the reward of forgiveness, the feeling of a clean slate, the guarantee of a fresh start, but I want them on my own terms, achievable by my own efforts.
However, just as the writer to the Hebrews points out, no subscription could ever take away my sins. Good deeds won’t. Offerings won’t. My reputation won’t.
Real, true, lasting forgiveness comes at a high price, but no subscription service is needed.
“But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God…For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.”
Jesus paid in full. Then, He invited us to identify with Him.
When we are in Christ, we are covered. Our sin is forgiven. Our old identities, be they cultural, behavioral, social, or moral, no longer apply. We now are in Him as His children and His friends, and we don’t sign on to being a Christian as if it is one of our many myriads of subscriptions.
Instead, it changes us from the inside out, and the rewards are so much better than a handful of weepuls.
“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His flesh…let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience…” (Hebrews 10:19-22).
Sarah Dixon Young 