For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39)
Lent is a season of repentance and we, like all mankind, have much for which we need to repent. Amazingly, God, as Paul expresses in the verses above, loves us despite our many flaws, our many shortcomings, our shared need for repentance. This is wonderful news! This undeserved love, epitomized by the death of Jesus on the cross, is the basis of our hope, our faith.
Part of repentance is confession. Every Sunday we publicly confess that we are poor, miserable sinners who deserve both temporary and eternal punishment for our sins. We then beg God for forgiveness, which Pastor, acting as God’s representative, announces to us.
In Sunday School class last Sunday, Ken talked about a fellow seminarian of his. As part of their friendship, they would exchange public confessions and then share absolution. He found this exercise tobe spiritually enriching.
Unfortunately, public confession, other than the joint confession we make during the worship service, has gone out of favor. While we seem comfortable confessing to sins as a group, as individuals I think we are somewhat reluctant to confess our sins, particularly those that we don’t want others to know, the things for which we are most ashamed.
Much of the rest of this article is a confession written from a first-person plural (we, us, our) perspective. However, much of it strikes very close to home for me. As I write this article, I am reminded of the closing line of the hymn "Alas, and did my Savior bleed?", which is "For such a worm as I?" After reading this article, I suggest rereading it replacing "we" with "I", "us" with "me" and "our" with "my" and see if it also strikes you that way.
As poor, miserable sinners, sometimes doubt creeps in, and it is hard to believe that the Almighty God, the Creator of the universe and everything in it, loves us. It is easier to believe that we deserve punishment, even eternal punishment, for all the wrongs we have committed, for all the times we have rebelled against God, for every time we elevated ourselves above Him, than to believe that God loves us so much that He was willing to humiliate Himself, to become man, to be born and grow up in the humblest of settings, to ultimately die an excruciating, shameful death on a cross, all so that we don’t get the punishment we so deserve. This is incredible! Why would He do this for us?
The world is full of evil. This nation is full of evil. We are full of evil. We have abandoned God and pursued so many false gods. We have bought into vile ideologies, we have murdered our unborn children at the altar of reproductive health, of lifestyle choices, of sexual freedom, we have remained silent while our country has adopted more and more wicked anti-Biblical positions, we have let our sinful, self-centered culture penetrate our churches, with many churches, even denominations, abandoning the Bible, replacing God’s Word with social justice, with support for lifestyles the Bible describes as abominable. We have placed our desires above God’s will. Yet, God loves us. Even while we were/are His enemies, He loves us. Even when we turn on Him and call for His crucifixion, He loves us. He wants to forgive us. He wants to reconcile with us. He wants to save us. Why?
Compared to God, we are nothing. The earth is a little rock in an enormous universe, and we are each just one out of billions of inhabitants of that rock. Our sun is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and our galaxy is just one of perhaps billions of galaxies in the universe. This entire universe, with its countless number of stars and probably even more planets, was created by the all-powerful God. Over the course of six days. Spoken into existence out of nothing. A God that all powerful cares about us? Loves us? We seem so insignificant.
To be honest, it’s amazing to think that the almighty God even knows who we are, yet alone loves us with all our imperfections. It’s incredible that this God would stoop so low as to become one of us, would undertake to fix the mess that we’ve created, would offer Himself as a sacrifice in our place. What have we ever done for Him? Why would He do anything for us?
A God that controls our future, that determines where we spend eternity, that can sentence us to eternal suffering or save us to eternal bliss is One to be feared. A God so powerful, so much in control, is a God we should approach with great trepidation, yet we so often take Him for granted. We enter His church not in thanksgiving and praise but with our hearts and minds elsewhere, in conversations about trivial topics, in laughter and joviality. We daydream during the sermon; we don’t pay attention during the readings. We approach the altar for Communion without truly examining ourselves. We leave church and immediately our focus turns from God to what to eat, what we need to accomplish that day, to everything but doing God’s will.
It’s amazing that, despite our unfaithfulness, God wants to have anything to do with us. We are so unworthy of His love. Yet He loves us. More than we can possibly fathom. Despite our miserable flaws, our unfaithfulness, He loves us.
The love that God has for us is beautiful, incomprehensible, unfathomable, completely undeserved. If our being poor, miserable, self-centered sinners is not enough to deter God from loving us, then Paul is undoubtedly correct in stating that nothing can separate us from God’s love. How wonderful this is! God loves you! God loves me! Despite our many, many, many shortcomings God still loves us, still offers us forgiveness and eternal life!
Thanks be to God that this is not a reciprocal relationship, Thank God that His love for us is not dependent on our faithfulness to Him. Thanks be to Jesus that His willingness to undertake our punishment didn’t depend on our worthiness.
Whenever we sin, and the ways listed in this article are just a few of the many ways we sin against God, we rebel against Him, we turn our back on Him. We are in almost constant need of repentance, as our many sins interfere with our relationship with our Lord and Savior. We, like all mankind, desperately need the forgiveness that only God can give us.
When Jesus became man, when He suffered and died on the cross, He did so for miserable sinners like you and me. He didn’t do it because He saw something worthwhile in us, something worth saving. He did it even though we are repugnant sinners who don’t begin to deserve it. He did it out of love for us, even though we are, by nature, His enemies. He did it because He truly wants to save all of us, He truly wants to share eternal bliss with us, He truly wants to adopt us as His brothers and sisters.
Lent is a season when we focus on repentance, when we review the passion story of our Lord and Savior. We hear of the terrible sufferings He underwent. We read of His unjustified condemnation, His horrible death on the cross. We celebrate His resurrection on Easter, His victory over sin, death, and the devil. We remember everything that Jesus did, and we contemplate in amazement that He did this for us!
We have a wonderful, incredible, loving God! We deserve so much worse than what He wants to give us.