The blood of Jesus is sufficient for the forgiveness of any and all sins because the Cross was two thousand years ago and all of our sins were still to come. Therefore, all of our sins, whether we committed them yesterday or today or have yet to commit them tomorrow, are covered by His blood – past sins, present sins, future sins, big sins, small sins, or medium-size sins – it makes no difference.
Praise God for the blood of Jesus that is sufficient to cover all of our sins! All of them! Big sins like murder. Little sins like gossip. Medium-size sins like losing your temper. They are all under the blood of Jesus, and we are free just to enjoy our forgiveness! We will never be held accountable for the guilt of our sins because Jesus has taken the punishment for us.
When have you felt so totally helpless that your prayer was fathoms deeper than mere words-it was a desperate heart’s cry? Was it when some bad thing happened to someone you love? Was it when you experienced . . .
a physical illness?
a financial collapse?
a severed relationship?
a social rejection?
Did you think because something bad happened, it indicated Jesus doesn’t really know what’s going on? Or that maybe He knows, but He’s not pleased with you? Or that if He does know, He just doesn’t love you or your family enough to do anything about it? Are you interpreting His love by your circumstances instead of interpreting your circumstances by His love? When we are tempted to question whether or not God cares, we are reminded that, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” God does care!
Sep 3, 2013
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust
in your brother’s eye and pay no attention
to the plank in your own eye? Matthew 7:3
This past week my two brothers, two sisters, and I had lunch with our father! It was the first time we had all been together at the same time with him since Mother’s funeral six years ago. All of us treasured the rare moments of fellowship and conversation, not knowing when we would have the opportunity again.
Cain had been created by God. He had been created with life from God. He had been created for God. And now he was separated from God. Unconfessed sin and rebellion makes a person so miserable in the presence of a holy, righteous God that the sin must either be confessed and cleansed or the sinner must leave God’s presence.
Cain’s tragic life illustrates the hard lesson that guilt is our friend if it drives us to God. However, if we refuse to turn to God in repentance and confession, guilt will drive us away from God to our own destruction. Cain’s bitterness that was rooted in resentment and rebellion bore wicked fruit in his family for generations to follow. Cain’s sin, left to take its own natural course, intensified with each generation until the entire civilization of the world in his day was ravaged by it.
What sin in your life – if left unchecked – will ravage the life of your children?
God created you and me to live with Him in His heavenly home, enjoying fellowship with Him and glorifying Him forever! Death was not part of His plan. It was through Adam’s sin that death – temporal and eternal – entered humanity. And death entered creation as well.
Flowers fade. Grass withers. Birds sing in minor key. Trees lose their leaves because “creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom. 8:20-21, NIV). Because of man’s sin, creation has been in a cycle of death and decay. The greatest threat to our environment is not fluorocarbon or nuclear testing or the burning of tropical forests in the Amazon River region or toxic waste. The greatest threat to our environment has been and is sin! So . . . help to clean up the environment by repenting of your sin!
