Friday 29 Jun 2012

Friday Reading: 1 Timothy 1:13-16

Key Verse: 1 Timothy 1:13
13  Who was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

Devotion:
When we are angry with others or with the world we will always find fault with so that we don’t have to be the only one who is angry – just maybe we can wind someone else up enough for them to be angry too! When we are in the wrong we will always try to find some way of involving others so that we are not the only ones who will get the blame. Somehow we always want to share bad things so that we are not alone, but we don’t always want to share good things when they do come round! So if we are honest with ourselves we then get to admit that we just don’t like being found out.

Sometimes we think of it as being ok until such time as we are found out, or if we can get away with it then it must be ok to continue getting away with it. How can we get away with thoughts like that? Simple, we justify it by saying that what others don’t know about will not hurt them. How often we do forget the truth that God does see everything!

That is the most amazing thing that we find out from God’s Word – that God is willing to forgive us no matter what we have done wrong in the past. So when we do find out that we have been doing it all wrong or that we have been working against God’s will for so long, we can still know that Christ has paid everything in full and that we can be forgiven! It is not the fact that we were ignorant but the fact that God is merciful toward us that counts. He is the one who is going to have to do the forgiving and just because we did not know it was wrong does not mean that it was not wrong. I can remember putting my fingers into a pot of oil to grab the chip that was still in the oil; just because I thought that it did not look hot did not mean that it was not hot! My fingers started to fry as soon as they touched the oil!

The grace of our Lord goes far beyond anything that we can imagine, far beyond anything that we can extend toward others and far beyond what we would think of as necessary. His love for us is without limits. Our thoughts cannot go deep enough to fully realise the depths of the meaning that Christ came into the world to save us from our sin – we are, after all, rotten to the core before He picks us up and cleans us!

Points to Ponder:
How deep is your sin?

How much has Christ forgiven you?