There is an old Hymn that says, "Once my heart was heavy with the load of sin, Jesus took that sin and gave me wonderful peace within my heart and now I'm singing as the days go by. Jesus took my burden all away."
I find the scriptures very convicting. Funny how that works. I spent most of my day yesterday meditating on 1 John 3:1-10. It is a passage that I'm going to preach on Sunday, and I'm at the point of an expositional series where the themes of a short letter start getting very repetitive. 1 John's themes revolve around togetherness, God's love, and the difference between a life of sin and a life in Christ.
It's the last theme that I dealt with this morning after my workout. The Christian life is such a tension between grace and holiness. We receive grace from God because nothing we ever do on our own merit would be good enough to receive forgiveness for the wrong we've done. But continuing to sin after we've been forgiven is not the appropriate behavior for those who are in Christ. So there is Grace on one end and the act of holy living on the other, and the truth is in the tension in the middle. But this morning I took time to sort through my heart, my actions, my motivations to discard from my life the things that don't honor Christ. I sat on the bench on the side of the B&A Trail and confessed sin, repented of some things, and asked the Lord's help to live rightly.
I'd like to tell you that I have a systematic understanding of the difference that John writes about, but I don't. I'm just a man trying to pursue God under grace and trying to live right.
--Ben
No comments:
Post a Comment