Saint and Sinner - 8 January 2010

^“I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:15, 24-25

I have focussed this week on recognising sin in our lives, and looking to God to change us.  Maybe you are only too aware of the sin in your life, and these devotionals have only served to make you feel worse.  I’m sorry if that is the case. But whether you are conscious of your sin, or struggling to recognise it, the startling truth as Christians is that we are free to look at it knowing we are forgiven through the Grace of Jesus, and he can change us if we let him.  We don’t have to cling on to our worldly identity and justify it along with our sin, but rather knowing that we are being transformed into something much better by the work of the Holy Spirit inside us.

Do you think of yourself as a saint or a sinner?  I think we can tend to focus on our forgiveness or our fallenness, depending on our personality or mood.  The truth is as Christians we are both.  There is no point in us looking at our sin unless we know we are forgiven and brought into complete wholeness in Christ.  Equally, we do not appreciate the measure of our forgiveness unless we look at the sin in our lives. Unless we recognise our sin, we limit what God can do in us to transform us into the likeness of Christ.

Gerard Hughes says “ …many of the saints, guilty of no serious wrongdoing in their lives, think of themselves as great sinners.  They have reached the depths of sinfulness in themselves of which most of us are blissfully unaware.  They are amazed and full of gratitude to God, who accepts them in their darkness and sinfulness, while those of us who have not reached those depths may be delighted and full of gratitude at our own respectability.”

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.” Romans 8:1,2