What Jesus REALLY Said About Sin

If you’ve ever wondered why your proclamations of the Good News about Jesus Christ are impotent, might I suggest reading this excellent devotional by Oswald Chambers (updated language by James Reimann) about what Scripture reveals as the true nature of sin? 
He states:

Sin is a fundamental relationship–it is not wrong doing, but wrong being–it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith basis every thing on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins–The Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.

The revealed truth of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, But that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch. God made His own son “to be sin”that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in his own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the cross. 

A man cannot redeem himself–redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its application to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or response to it. A distinction must always be made between the revealed truth of redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.

Insights from Providence

Being periodically presented with the privilege of perusing Providence is a quite fantastic thing.  Sometimes, this vision into the aftereffects of the Spirit working in our lives is of something so seemingly insignificant that others cannot conceive of the importance being granted such a vision is.  Sometimes, I think this is intended not only to humble us who wish to share such visions with others (and in so doing puff up with pride at what God has granted us), but also to show us the specialness of such a vision.  These special glimpses into the way God uses us when we let Him lead are sometimes meant to reinforce the intimacy in the relationship we build with God, and through the Spirit’s workings and visions we can see the joy that comes from letting the Spirit lead and inform our decisions.

If we work every day at building and reinforcing that most intimate of all relationships with God, we will one day be granted a vision of all the wonderful ways the Spirit used us unknowingly, and we will hopefully have cause for much rejoicing.  Remember also, however, that we will also see and stand accountable for every unjust and evil action we have ever committed.  Woe to us who have horrid pasts.  Woe to us who wreaked wretched and reckless wrath.  We must all stand accountable before the throne of God, and it is my wish that one day, despite all the damaging and devastating destruction I have done, I will be able to hear those words I so desperately want to hear uttered from the lips of my Savior, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”  I haven’t had it anywhere near as bad as Paul or Jesus had it, but I am fully and utterly prepared to endure every kind of torture and pain for Christ, whatever form it will take.  Jesus suffered and died so that we can live, and “no servant is greater than his master.”  I know full well that the Gospel is free to receive, but we must remember that it will cost us everything we have.

I pray that I may suffer as much as is necessary (and as little as is possible) to accomplish all Christ means to through me, for the good of others in the Kingdom that is Here and Now, and for the good of all in the Kingdom that is Not Yet.  I pray the same for all of those who truly wish to serve the King of Kings and help unite the Kingdoms of Here and Now, and Not Yet into that place we will one day call Home.