God is vitally concerned with His firstfruits because of their important part in His plan. He is deeply concerned with their attitude and wants to know if they are totally surrendered to Him.

Before the Passover, we should take a close look at ourselves. To do this effectively, we must be close to God—His Holy Spirit must be flowing through us, and our minds must be in tune with His.

No matter how long we’ve been in God’s Church or how spiritual we may think we have become, we are still human beings with a carnal mind that’s naturally hostile toward God. None of us will ever grow to the stage where we can afford to forget what we are and the magnitude of the sacrifice the Godhead made for each of us, individually.

Remove Deception

At present, Satan is the ruler of this world, and he has blinded men’s minds to an understanding of the tremendous price that was paid for our sins. “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are [perishing]: In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Corinthians 4:3-5). A blinded mind cannot see the wonderful vision of the God Family or grasp the value of the sacrifice that was made to open the God Family to mankind.

The Apostle John tells us how we can guard against the deception of this sort of blindness: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever” (1 John 2:15-17). We need to evaluate our relationship with God and ensure we really have come out of the world and its influence on us. We must be asking God to cleanse our minds and purify our thoughts. We need to get deeper than the sins that we can see and the actions we take. We need to ask God to help us eradicate even the thought of sin—to cut sin off before it is conceived in our minds.

The lead-up to Passover is a time when we ought to remember the great miracle God performed in leading us out of spiritual Egypt—out of sin. It is through His Spirit that God draws us to Him and grants repentance. He then holds up His spiritual mirror and begins to allow us to see ourselves as we appear to Him.

The first thing God opens our minds to is the deceptiveness of our human nature and its hostility toward Him and His law.

Christ Died for You

When we first saw our evil nature, we longed to be different. We looked into that mirror and saw something we did not like. We wanted to be changed—brought to repentance. We followed through and were baptized in that watery grave and brought up, as an outward symbol of our faith in the death, burial and resurrection of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

We desired to stop being God’s enemy, stop being deceitful and wicked, and to have all past evil deeds and thoughts buried in that watery grave. We set out to become a new and different person, because we realized that Jesus Christ died for us, individually.

As we approach Passover, each of us must grasp that if you were the only person alive who had ever sinned it still would have taken the death of the Logos to redeem you—to pay the penalty for your sins! You need to be very cognizant of the fact that it is as if you, individually, were there in a.d. 31 and personally nailed Christ to the stake, took up a spear and thrust it into His side while you stood and watched His life drain away to pay for your personal sins. After all, our sins killed Christ, and thus we all have become guilty of the blood of our Lord and Savior.