RRR_Forgiven
In one of the scriptures, Paul says, I must be out of my mind to talk to you people this way. And he's talking about his experiences with serving Jesus and the various things that have happened to him; how many times he's been whipped, how many times he's been shipwrecked, and he says that it sounds like boasting at some point and that he would never want to be guilty of boasting. Except in what?
Except in the strength of Jesus, because Paul had realized that when he is weak, Jesus is strong, and there is an ancillary statement to that that we want to remember, we're talking about, remembering it, and what we want to remember is:
We're weak. We are weak.
And that's beyond honesty and beyond confessional, it's beyond the fact that we're sinners, who find it nearly impossible to escape the lies of satan, he's clever, so we do sin.
But we can what confess and Jesus does what? Forgives and so when we come to recounting the times that Jesus has forgiven us. Forgiven us of sins that we are guilty of. This is not something that there is any doubt about. Well, I don't know if that was a sin or not, no, there's no prevarication here, this is absolute! Boom that was a sin.
That was a lie I stole, I cheated, I lied;
I was lusting; whatever; all the various multitude of sins that we weak humans are capable of when we refuse to call upon the Holy Spirit to get in the midst of it. Before we commit it, when we don't listen to him; because he says, you don't have to do this, when we commit the sin, where Christ forgives us when we confess to him, the sin and ask him to forgive us, he forgives us how many times? Innumerable times, innumerable times.
So we recertify the fact that Christ forgives us. Now, listen, that's an aggravation to people who don't understand forgiveness, that's an aggravating point about Christianity, to people who don't understand forgiveness. And here's what they'll say, sometimes they'll say, man, I don't want to be around those people because they're hypocrites.
And one person told me this, to me one time; he said, I don't want to go down to that church man, because there's a bunch of hypocrites down there, and I said, really, do you know them? I mean, can you tell me who they are, because I'd love to chat with them? He didn't like that very much, but the simple fact of the matter is, he was saying what people commonly say they don't behave like they claim that they're supposed to behave?
Well, guess what nobody does, and the person saying that they certainly don't, but it's not our place to point that out to them, it's our place to understand that we're forgiven and recertify the facts.
That we are going to follow Jesus, and we're going to share with our disciples, our 4 personal people, that we're going to be sure they're coming back to Jesus.
Comments