Thursday, August 10, 2006

A Proper Knowledge of What Sin Is

This is another thought from a devotional by Andrew Murray that I'm working through. I must say I have never thought of sin in this way. Wow! What do you think?

Romans 5:8
To understand grace and to understand Christ aright, we must understand what sin is. How can we come to this understanding? Through the light of God and His Word.

Come with me to the beginning of the Bible. We see man created by God after His image and pronounced by his Creator to be very good. Then sin entered. It was rebellion against God. Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden and brought, along with untold millions, under the curse and utter ruin.

When we visit Mount Calvary we see the hatred and enmity with which the world cast out and crucified the Son of God. Here sin reached its climax. Christ was made sin and became a curse as the only way to destroy the power of sin. In the agony of Gethsemane, when He prayed that He might be spared the terrible cup, and in excruciating pain on the cross with its deep darkness and desertion by the Father, we get a faint glimpse of the curse and the indescribable suffering sin brings. If anything can cause us to hate and detest sin, it is seeing Christ on that bitter cross.

Remember that you are a child of God. Sometimes you commit sin: you allow it to fulfill its desires. The great power of sin is that it blinds us so that we do not recognize its true character. Remember what God thinks about sin: His holiness burns against it; He sacrficed His Son to conquer sin and to deliver us from it.

Nothing except constant fellowship with God can teach you as His child to hate sin as God hates it. Nothing but the close fellowship of the living Christ can make it possible for you to understand what sin is and to detest it. Without this deeper understanding of sin, we cannot truly appropriate the victory that Christ made possible for us.
You want to know what sin looks like? You want to know the death it brings? You want to know God's perspective on sin? Look at the cross. That's the greatest illustration of the debt of sin. That's the picture of sin's wages.

I want no part of that. "Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord." Acts 3:19-20a