Our New Roomba
February 13, 2019
My wife has wanted a Roomba for some time. She’s heard how great it is by word of mouth from her friends. A Roomba is a robot vacuum cleaner that vacuums your house for you. As a sensitive and prudent husband of 24 years, I have learned that it’s not good etiquette to buy cleaning machines or exercise equipment for your wife. As much as she may have wanted it, I thought it better not to commit the marital faux pas of buying a vacuum for her as a gift, even though she wanted it. Well, she got some gift cards for Christmas, waited for a sale, and with a 20% off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond, behold, we now own a Roomba! I have literally not seen my wife this happy since the birth of our children! 🙂 You can program it to work in certain areas from an app on your phone. It comes with a separate laser that you can shoot across a doorway or opening that works like and electric fence. The Roomba won’t cross it. After it has finished vacuuming the area you have set, it returns to its base to recharge its batteries. It’s fresh and ready to go the next time you want it. When you come down in the morning, your house is vacuumed. It really comes in handy, especially when you have an ever-shedding dog. The beauty of it is that it does your work for you without procrastinating, complaining, or demanding payment.
When we are overloaded with work, or stressed out about all the things we have to get done, it would be nice to have a personal assistant to do our work for us. Who wouldn’t want someone who is available all the time to run our errands and do all the things we have to do? All of this got me thinking about the one thing that we all have to do, that none of us wants to do, and that is, to die. Wouldn’t it be great if someone died for us so that we wouldn’t have to die? We could just continue on blissfully because someone was kind enough to die in our place. Of course, someone HAS already died in our place. Jesus came down from heaven, leaving His place of glory as the second person of the Trinity and became a man. He lived a sinless life and died on a cross to pay our sin debt to God. Then God the Father raised Him from the dead and exalted Him back to the place He occupied before He became a man. All who trust in His work on the cross for salvation will go to heaven. Someone has done the work for us.
Now, if we are going to get as excited about the work a Roomba can do, why would we not get excited about the work that Jesus did? When I come down in the morning, there is no dog hair on my kitchen floor. That’s great, but honestly, it would take me less than five minutes of pushing a vacuum around to accomplish what the Roomba did while I was asleep. Jesus did work that I could not do if I had 1000 lifetimes. Only Jesus could pay the penalty for sin because only He is God, and only He became a man and was able to live a life without sin, which qualified Him to serve as our substitute. After Jesus’ work, I receive something immeasurably better than a clean kitchen floor, I get eternal life!
I’m as guilty as anyone for finding ways to make my life easier. The Roomba does that. I love online banking, GPS navigation on my phone, and a host of other modern conveniences. But some things can’t be fixed with technology. We have health problems, money problems, relational problems and a host of other problems. We worry about the daily difficulties of life, praying that God would make our lives easier, or praying that if God would just take care of this ‘one thing’ for us, we could relax. The truth is that God has taken care of the one thing we need to relax. Hebrews 2:14-15: “Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. 15 Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.” We don’t need to fear death because Jesus died for us. Death is a gateway to eternal life with Him.
My one complaint about the Roomba is that if you don’t contain it to a smallish area its battery will die before the work is done. In the morning you find it dead, but you can’t tell where it’s been and what it’s missed. When Jesus died on the cross, He said, “It is finished.” That means He has completed ALL the work of salvation. So enjoy your Roomba; enjoy other helpful technology. Making our lives easier is fine, but our primary goal is to be sure that we and others will make it to heaven. Remember that Jesus did greater work, that brought a greater benefit to us than anything else we could have on earth. He bought the one thing we could never buy: our souls! Like the good news of the Roomba, the Good News of Jesus Christ also spreads by word of mouth.
