Copyright by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
Our transgressions are deeper than we know. It remains a temptation, even as believers, to minimize personal disobedience to our Lord. We may acknowledge our trespasses and even ask forgiveness for them, but most of us rarely spend a lot of time thinking about just how much they grieve the heart of God. Beyond that some go so far as to say that there is a huge difference between what they consider to be major and minor wrongs as far as God is concerned. Surely our Father does not put murder on the same level as, say, speeding?<\/p>\n
It may well be that He doesn\u2019t but because He is absolutely holy all our wrongs are deeply repugnant to Him, be they large or small in our own eyes. Attempting to quantify relative levels of offense in the light of that holiness is not something we should enter into lightly. In fact it may well be that we are not capable of making such \u201cvalue judgments\u201d at all. Who can put a value on the offensiveness of one evil over another but the divine One who is the most offended Party? That even a single sin is enough to condemn us to Hell apart from the saving power of Christ should more than give us pause. It should make us shudder. What we euphemistically refer to as our \u201cmistakes\u201d and \u201cfailures\u201d are all a stench in the nostrils of a righteous God. We take the ramifications of all sin far too lightly in much of the 21st<\/sup> Century Western Church.<\/p>\n However when, with the Spirit\u2019s help, we do pause to seriously consider our trespasses, we may find ourselves mired in the opposite error. Remorse over our wrongs is something that we are encouraged to pursue in Scripture. Make no mistake about it, deep repentance requires deep contrition, the depth of which we frankly find difficult to enter without the true conviction of the Spirit to help us. Such contrition is a very good thing. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, especially those whose hearts are broken by pondering how they have offended the God of their salvation. It is not this kind of remorse I refer to, but the state of fear that may come with a new awareness of just how bad our \u201cbadness\u201d truly is. Such a fear can shake our confidence in our very salvation if we let it. This is not a fruit of the Spirit so much as the fruit of our perceived guilt and it is not of God. It was one thing to feel condemned by God, the Father, when we were existing outside the saving grace of His Son, it is quite another to feel it as His blood-bought children.<\/p>\n It is now when one of the most glorious facts of the faith can save us from the despair and resulting paralysis in our lives which is brought on by reckoning with still present sin. That fact is this; our sin is, indeed, worse than we think, but God\u2019s answer to it is greater than we think. It is all summed up in one of the most blessed verses in all the Bible, Romans 5:20 tells us that \u201cWhere sin abounds grace abounds all the more.\u201d The unfathomable love of God in Christ is the agent of supra-abounding grace. Our transgressions, whatever they may be, are powerful in their offense, this is true; however the unmerited favor of God in the lives of His children is far more deeply powerful<\/em> in cleansing us from those transgressions when we confess them and sincerely ask for forgiveness. If we continue to confess Christ in our lives we will always have access to this grace that goes deeper than our sin. The Word of God tells us this is so, and the Word of God is trustworthy.<\/p>\n So our wrongs should never be taken lightly, but they also need never lead to despair if we begin to reckon with their true depth. Our sin is great, but the effect of the shed blood of Christ is greater still. Because of that blood His grace is sufficient, both to bring us to the place of reckoning and to lovingly lead us beyond that place to real repentance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved Our transgressions are deeper than we know. It remains a temptation, even as believers, to minimize personal disobedience to our Lord. We may acknowledge our trespasses and even ask forgiveness for them, but most of us rarely spend a lot of time thinking about just how much they… <\/p>\n