Monthly Thought

April 2007

So bearing in mind some of lasts months "thought" (Philippians 4:6-7) I brought the task of writing something for this month to God and asked him to help me with what I should say. The same subject kept popping up over the next few days, and that is the way that sin can be in control of our life often without us realising and it can also restrict our relationship with God.

Romans 6:15-23 says, "What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey - whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

The concept of being a slave is something which, in my thinking, is quite hard to understand. I'm not used to the idea of people being the slaves of others, so initially it took a while for me to get my head round it. This passage is saying we were all slaves to sin and I had a think about what that actually means and how I could relate it to my experience. I remember situations at school where my friends would say nasty things about someone, sometimes I would ignore it and not get involved, other times I would join in with the comments but I would never do the right thing and tell my friends that what they were doing was wrong. Looking back, I can't see why I didn't choose the right thing but the same thing happens even now.

However, there is a positive point made in this passage, we don't have to be slaves to sin anymore. There is a different way for us to live, which Jesus has opened to us through his death on the cross. We can obey God rather than our sinful nature and become slaves to righteousness, so that we are no longer controlled by our sin and we are free to do the right thing. And, what's more, if we become "slaves to righteousness" and offer our lives to God, we will receive God's gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Our sin gets in between us and God and can stop us from having a relationship with him, it can be little things at first, but if we don't go to God for help and forgiveness things can build up and the bad things we do can escalate. We can get to a point where we think how could God possibly forgive me I've done so many things to hurt him how can he still love me.

1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."

So if we come before God and admit that we have done things wrong and ask him to forgive us he will completely cleanse us from all the bad that we have done. The parable of the lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) shows this, the younger son goes away and does everything he possibly could to hurt his father, he shows no concern for his father or his father's authority, all he wants is to get his money and rule his own life. He ends up wasting all that his father has given him and realises that he has screwed up big style. When he returns to his father, his dad doesn't say "I can't forgive you", he shows his son love and celebrates the fact that he has come back. God loves You and he wants to have a relationship with you, no matter what you have done he still loves you as much as ever. For those who are still thinking that God couldn't love them, I have one more bible verse that you may be familiar with, but really think about what these words mean and the enormous sacrifice that God made for every single one of us.

John 3:16-17 says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."

If you have any questions then email me on sam.mcnaughton@gmail.com.

Sam