I’ve been to Blackpool beach a few times in my life, mostly during my time at university. We’d all pile into the car and drive a few hours to escape into the world of fish and chips, sticks of rock and sand between our toes!

It was on one of these trips that a couple of us, my tall friend Spence and I decided to go on this:

This ‘little’ beauty is the beast know as the Pepsi Max! A roller coaster that just looking straight up from the ground made you feel dizzy, let alone riding it.

It was one blue sky day that Spence and I looked at this epic scaffold and decided: #challengeaccepted. We made our way to the ticket booth to buy tickets. In exchange for our money we were given a token to give to the ride operator. So we head on over to the ride, hand in our token and spend the best part of the next three minutes climbing up and plummeting to earth at break neck speed all in the name of fun!

We claimed our ride on the roller coaster by redeeming our token. It was the only way we could get onto that coaster, by handing over the token in exchange for the ride.

In short redeem means: to claim.

Let’s scale this up and add Jesus shall we? When we use the word redeem as a follower of Jesus we mean it in the same sense, but we’re not the ones redeeming, we are the ones redeemed.

But the price for us was much higher. Jesus didn’t redeem us with a voucher, it wasn’t a one ride redemption, he redeemed us with his life, for always.

At Easter I posted about back in the beginning following the first sin and why Jesus had to come. What Jesus did on the cross, the death, followed by the resurrection was Him redeeming us, paying for our sin so that we didn’t have to die for it. He saves us. He redeemed us with his life.

That’s why you might hear people refer to Jesus as – Christ the redeemer or the phrase, we are redeemed.