Listen! The Lord’s arm is not too weak to save you,Calvin Coolidge was known for his economy of words. He didn’t say much. When he went to church one Sunday, someone asked him what the preacher spoke about. He replied “Sin.” When they asked him what he said, President Coolidge said, “He was agin’ it.”
nor is his ear too deaf to hear you call.
It’s your sins that have cut you off from God.
Because of your sins, he has turned away
and will not listen anymore. (Isaiah 59:1-2)
God is against sin, no matter the form or the reason behind it. And because we are sinful people, he has to be against us. He doesn’t want to be, but he has to be. Sin is directly contrary to his nature, that nature of holiness.
That is why Jesus came, to take away our sin by his sacrifice and to bring us back into the presence of God as we were before the fall in the Garden of Eden. Jesus takes away sin. When we are in Jesus, we are free from sin.
That doesn’t mean that we can do what we want, but it does mean that when we mess up, and we will, God looks at us through the prism of his Son, Jesus, and sees us as sinless.
Our response is to remain as good as we can be. To be, as Jesus said, perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48). We know that we cannot be sinless, but we try to be. We do it because we love him.
The world has been taken over by sin. You see it everywhere in everything. Music is full of it, movies are chock full of it, our children reflect it in their language and the way they talk to each other, it is apparent in our music and even in our business dealings with each other. Sin has weighed us down and there is nothing we can do about it except to accept Jesus and his grace.
And above all, we have to recognize that sin for what it is. The apostle John said in 1 John 3:4-5: Everyone who sins is breaking God’s law, for all sin is contrary to the law of God. And you know that Jesus came to take away our sins, and there is no sin in him.
Sin is real and it tears up your life and your heart. Sex outside of marriage, drunkenness, greed, embezzlement, lying – all are tearing your life up. The only thing that can put your life and your heart back together is Jesus. He came to take that sin away.
The world sits in sin and wallows in sin because it will not recognize that power of Jesus. But God is able to take it away when you accept him into your heart, when you allow him in.
Everybody sins (Romans 3:23), even really good Christians that come to church each week (1 John 1:8). The only ones who are without sin are those who have given their hearts to Jesus and trust him.
God is agin’ sin but he is not agin’ you. He loves you and never intended you to be in sin in the first place. His arm will pull you back in, his grace will remove that sin, his love will accept you.
Let him do it.
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