The Best of the Portals of Prayer

Read: Luke 23:39-43

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise.”
Luke 23:43

Welcome in the Father’s House

Of the few persons in Scripture specifically tell us are now in the Father’s house, one was a criminal. To a man who had misspent his life in sin and shame, but who had come to faith in the Redeemer, the Savior opened wide the doors of His Father’s house and said: “truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” There was room even for this dying thief in the Father’s house.
Heaven is like that. It’s mansions are peopled, not with those who in this life paraded as the paragons of piety and virtue while spurning the Savior’s mercy, but with the vast unnumbered throng of converted dying thieves, pentitent publicans, and those, both great and small, who have come “out of the great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” [Rev. 7:14].
What an inviting reassuring picture of our Father’s house – to remember that the dying thief awaits is there. His Savior is our Savior. The door by which he entered the Father’s house is still open to us: the door to repentance for sin and faith in a divine Redeemer. The same blood that availed for him will avail for us. Yes, verily, “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” [1st John 1:7].

February 08, 1944