Wednesday 8 Aug 2012

Wednesday Reading: Romans 6:21-23

Key Verse: Romans 6:23
23  For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Devotion:
It is all OK painting a great picture of how wonderful and loving our awesome God is, but we must always remember that He is Holy and that He is Just. That means that we are not going to get away with sin just because we think we can or we think that nobody is seeing what we do! God sees everything and will not ignore those things that we think we can ignore. Just because we think it is not so bad to do some things does not make them right. When God says something is a sin we must know that it is a sin and that we will be found out as soon as we think about getting down and dirty with that sin in our lives. As Christ reminded us, if we are thinking about the sin then we may as well be doing that sin.

God wants us to separate ourselves from the sin in our lives and that means asking Him for strength and guidance to avoid the sin, not just in avoiding doing the sin but avoiding thinking about them too. As we have said before in past devotions, the things that we allow into our lives tend to fill our lives and will eventually overflow or fall out of our lives – the old adage of garbage in, garbage out is one that we need to take notice of!

I like the way that Matthew Henry puts it in his commentary of the bible – the so-called ‘fruits’ of our sin are not worthy of being called fruits because we really do not want to have to remember the consequences of our sin. There is nothing good about the product of our sin because every sin works against God no matter whether we think it is in a good cause or not! But we do have a lifeline that God has thrown us and that is Jesus Christ His Son.

It is because of the blood that Jesus shed for us on the cross that we have any hope whatsoever. Because God does not miss anything, you could say that our sin has already found us out even before we have committed it! God cannot ignore our sin until it is covered by the blood of Christ because it is only once that sin debt has been paid that it can be put aside by God. We need to bring those sins to Christ and ask Him for forgiveness – He alone has promised to forgive us when we do exactly that. That is the other side of prayer that we tend to ‘forget’ so that we don’t have to remember!

Points to Ponder:
Do you ignore certain things in life?

Do you think God ignores what you ignore?