Did You Forget the Most Important Step?
Let me tell you about the great grocery fiasco of this past week. Jason and I live in a small farming community here in Wales, and our nearest "big" shop contains two small aisles of food, one aisle of household items, and an aisle filled with snacks and booze. So, we do what any sensible, technology-loving missionary couple does. We order our groceries online and have them delivered right to our door. It saves petrol and time, and it rescues me from the temptation of buying a chocolate bar "just because it's there."
Our grocery store's website has this magical little feature called "Instant Shop." It loads your cart automatically with everything you typically order. Milk? In the cart. Tea bags (a necessity of life here in Wales, mind you)? In the cart. From there, we go through and tweak, removing what we don't need and adding what we do.
Here's where it gets dicey. Once you hit "Checkout," you're bombarded with page after page of "Did you forget this?" "Are you sure you don't want that?" "This is on special!" You click "Continue." Then another page pops up. Click "Continue" again. And again. It's like the website is testing your endurance before finally letting you place the order.
This week, we thought we'd made it through all the pages.
We hadn't.
Somewhere between page two and the finish line, we got distracted, and the order never actually completed past the Instant Shop stage. When the delivery arrived, we had three bags of things we'd specifically removed and were completely missing half the items we actually needed for the week. We had skipped the most important step: the final confirmation.
Isn't that exactly how so many people approach life? They fill their cart with all sorts of good-sounding
things:
Success.
Money.
Comfort.
Reputation.
A nice house.
A tidy retirement plan.
They click through page after page of life, adding item after item, convinced that if they just get enough of the right things in their cart, they'll be satisfied. But they never click the one button that actually matters. They never finalize a relationship with Jesus Christ.
The writer of Hebrews put it plainly: "How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation" (Hebrews 2:3). Notice he didn't say "reject" salvation. He said "neglect." That's the scarier word, isn't it? Rejecting something requires a decision. Neglecting something just requires distraction. It involves getting so caught up in the "Did you forget this?" pop-ups of life that you never make it to the final page.
I think about all the people who say they believe in God, who might even call themselves "spiritual," but who have never actually stopped, confessed their sin, and trusted Christ alone for salvation. They've got a cart full of good intentions and moral effort, but the order never went through. And here's the sobering part: you don't find out your cart didn't save until the delivery arrives. Spiritually speaking, that delivery is eternity, and by then, there's no fixing a missed order.
The good news? Unlike my grocery mishap, God doesn't make salvation complicated with a dozen confusing pages. It's beautifully, refreshingly simple. Confess your sin, believe in your heart that Jesus died and rose again, and confirm that trust with Him (Romans 10:9). One step. One click, so to speak. And unlike my grocery delivery, this one is guaranteed to be exactly what you need every single time.
So, friend, check your spiritual cart today. Have you clicked "Continue" past believing all the right things about Jesus and actually confirmed your trust in Him alone? Don't let distraction cost you the only order that truly matters.
🔍 Pulling Back the Curtain: A Peek at the Study Behind This Post
This one started with pure frustration of our botched grocery order and a random thought: "We forgot the most important step." That single phrase sent me straight to my concordance, hunting for a Bible passage about people missing the crucial thing.
Step 1: I sat with the irritation of the mixed-up order and asked, "God, is there a lesson buried in this mess?" (There almost always is!)
Step 2: I searched my concordance for the word "neglect," since that's exactly what we'd done with the checkout button—not rejected the order, just neglected to finish it.
Step 3: That search led me straight to Hebrews 2:3, "How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation?" The word "neglect" jumped off the page because it matched my anecdote so precisely.
Step 4: I cross-referenced with Romans 10:9 to make sure the application had a clear, positive answer and not just a warning, but a solution.
Step 5: I double-checked commentary notes on Hebrews 2 to confirm "neglect" implies passive drifting rather than active rebellion, which confirmed the whole "distraction, not defiance" angle of the devotion.
Time note: This whole study took about 40 minutes, which is less time than it took me to reorder the groceries we were missing!
Try it yourself: The next time something ordinary frustrates you, ask what single word describes what went wrong, then go hunting for that word in a concordance. You'll be amazed what buried treasure turns up in Scripture when you follow just one thread!