How Big Is God? -- Hebrews 8:1-2

Hebrews 8:1-2


"Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man." (NKJV)

"The true tabernacle." There was a tabernacle built by the Jews, told about in the early books of the Old Testament. It was a real building built with real materials.

That’s not the point. The point isn’t that there is a dichotomy of true and false. The point is the source of our beliefs . . . what we believe is actually happening. Of course, we do all kinds of things here in our lives on earth. We create things. We build things. We own things. We control things. . . . Or we think we do. The fact is, any sense of being in control, of creating, of owning, is a fallacy because we are nothing apart from God.

"God stretches the northern sky over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. He wraps the rain in his thick clouds, and the clouds do not burst with the weight. He shrouds his throne with his clouds. He created the horizon when he separated the waters; he set the boundaries for day and night. The foundations of heaven tremble at his rebuke. By his power the sea grew calm. By his skill he crushed the great sea monster. His Spirit made the heavens beautiful, and his power pierced the gliding serpent. These are some of the minor things he does, merely a whisper of his power" (Job 26:7-14 NLT).

He hung the earth on nothing. He created the horizon. He set the boundaries for day and night. He made the heavens beautiful. THESE ARE SOME OF THE MINOR THINGS HE DOES, merely a whisper of His power.

We are nothing apart from God. Our belief that we are in control, that we make a difference, that we can have a life apart of from Him is simply an illusion.

The problem is that it’s difficult to get a handle on this kind of immensity. God is so enormous, so powerful, so all-encompassing that to think that big makes our brains hurt. So we often try to reduce Him to something we can get our minds and hearts around. In doing so, we fail Him and we fail ourselves, because we need a big God. We have big problems and we need a God Whose power and Whose love is big enough to both take care of those problems and to care about us day after day after day.

Think about it. Don’t you have friends or acquaintances who are so needy that after awhile they simply wear on you? They can’t seem to get it together. Life is so overwhelming and nothing we do to try to help seems to make a dent in their inability to deal with their problems. I think we sometimes believe we look that way to God. We have so many problems, so many heartaches, so many sins. Why would He continue to love, continue to provide, continue to forgive? And so, we kind of drop away from intimacy with Him, thinking that if we just drift along, He will still take care of us, but then we don’t have to be reminded daily of how inept we truly are.

The fact is, the Father wants us to come to Him with every need. He knows us so much better than we know ourselves and His love pours out on us, wanting to provide, wanting to care for us, wanting to forgive our sins. He chose to provide forgiveness even before we even knew we needed it! "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8 NKJV). How much more that we are now His adopted children does He want to reach out His hand and take care of us. But He won’t intrude where He’s not invited. He waits each day for us to come to Him. Today would be a great day to come into His presence, rest in His love, and learn just how powerful and wonderful He really is.

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

Jesus Is No Middle Manager -- Hebrews 7:24-28

Hebrews 7:24-28


"But He, because He continues forever, has an unchangeable priesthood. Therefore He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them. For such a High Priest was fitting for us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and has become higher than the heavens; who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men who have weakness, but the word of the oath, which came after the law, appoints the Son who has been perfected forever." (NKJV)

The best middle managers are those who can wisely and adroitly balance implementing their bosses’ mandates and represent the interests of the employees to those bosses. Usually middle managers are good at one or the other of these two skills. Either they are good at telling the employees what to do (and representing the bosses) or they are good at representing the employees to the bosses. Lindsay Cross, in her blog, represents the reality of this difficulty perfectly:

"There’s simply no way to win. If you follow orders from upper management, your team will be angry. If you stand with your employees, the executives will not be pleased. When the whole thing is said and done, one side will leave feeling less than fulfilled. That’s the reality of the situation" (http://www.thegrindstone.com/2012/06/14/office-politics/managing-men-the-balancing-act-of-middle-management-157/#ixzz3GxtBVcDC).

My guess is that many of us think of the Lord Jesus as some kind of middle manager. He stands between the Father and us, trying (not too successfully) to get us to "be good" and then groveling in front of the Father to love and accept these people mired in sin.

That is such a powerless and inaccurate way of looking at what is actually happening in heaven!

I’ve been reading through Leviticus. For me, it’s a hard book to get through, all rules and regulations . . . and lots and lots of blood. "Sprinkle the blood here." "Pour the blood here." I can’t imagine the kind of life the priests in the Old Testament had to live surrounded by hot, rotting blood. The smell must have been horrible. In fact, if you read the book—really read it—you’ll find that the altar wasn’t shiny and new at all, but covered with dried blood. Blood and ashes. A much better description of the consequences of sin than the Hollywood fantasies. What God required (as a representation of the sacrifice the Lord Jesus would make for us) wasn’t pretty or sanitized. It was awful!

And it was necessary . . . because sin isn’t pretty. We desperately needed (and still need) a Savior. The Father knows this and He provided One out of Himself! He provided His only begotten Son.

The Lord Jesus became our Savior, but more than that, He became our High Priest. The High Priest was someone who would take the person’s sacrifice, place it on the altar, kill it, drain all its blood, and then destroy it with fire. The representation was that the sin was then destroyed, after the pouring out of the life blood of the sacrifice. This is what the Lord Jesus has done for us! But even as He is our High Priest, He also became our sacrifice. He was killed, drained of blood, and then destroyed by death. And now He—the perfect sacrifice—is standing before the Father, interceding for us.

The Lord Jesus—God Himself—is pleading with Himself for us. Do you see what’s happening? God so loves us that He provided a sacrifice—Himself—and then intercedes with Himself on our behalf. He knew that there was no one else in all creation who would be able to fully provide salvation in this way for us. And so He became the provision!

The Lord Jesus is no middle manager, ineffectively trying to balance the interests of upper management with the employees. Rather, the Lord Jesus is the upper management (in fact, the owner) representing both the interests of the Trinity to us and then representing us to Himself. How marvelous is that! God has become our representative to Himself! He became our sacrifice. He has become our High Priest, and He is our Savior.

"So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it" (Hebrews 4:16 NLT).

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. 

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

God Delights in Our Lives When . . . (Hebrews 7:18-19)

Hebrews 7:18-19


"For on the one hand there is an annulling of the former commandment because of its weakness and unprofitableness, for the law made nothing perfect; on the other hand, there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God." (NKJV)

Everything my mom told me about old age is true.

Not that I count myself old (though I’m approaching that age when I could access Social Security if I choose to do so), but I find myself having passed the age when my biological mother died and coming close to the age when my own dear mother went to be with the Lord. I’m certainly older than dirt (or so I tell my students)! And I’m finding that a great many things that my mom and my aunts shared with me as they approached the end of their lives are definitely true.

First, I don’t feel old. Oh, my body has creaks and groans and certainly isn’t as amiable to the punishment of various activities as it was a few years ago. And there are a few gray hairs peaking out amid the brown. Of course, the inevitable wrinkles and age spots have appeared. But overall, I don’t feel old. I hang out with a lot of folks younger than me (mostly because they’re much more interested in the things of life than many folks my age and older) and I keep active . . . very active!

Secondly, I’m finding that I’m living differently. Now, most of you are going to jump to the conclusion that I’m talking about how I eat and exercise . . . and I’m not! Oh, of course, I’ve changed my diet (and will continue to do so) and I stay physically active. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how I’m realizing how little I actually understand about life itself and how it works. I’m understanding that, the older I get, the less I really know about being a Christian and serving the Lord. The more I’m becoming dependent upon prayer and trust in the Lord Jesus to guide my decisions.

I can remember when I was much younger, how I would make a certain decision, convinced on how others around me would respond . . . and then shocked when their responses were different than I had imagined they would be! Through my life I have often felt like a pin ball in a pin ball machine, simply bouncing off life (and other people) from one situation to another, trying to make the best decisions I could and simply not controlling at all what happened to me or those around me.

Totally out of control and not understanding why.

We often fail to understand why life is the way it is because we fail to understand that God has a plan for us that is far bigger, far broader, far more wonderful than we could have ever imagined. And that plan is about bringing us "a better hope."

It is this "better hope" that the writer to the Hebrews begins to discuss in chapter 7 and continues on with in chapter 11:

"And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us" (v. 39-40 NKJV).

In the beginning . . . once upon a time . . . God chose for Himself a people (eventually) called the Israelites (or the Jews). He gave them laws which established their culture and religious practices and which set them apart—by lifestyle—from their neighboring countries. And it was from this people that the promised Savior would come. The Jews had lived in these specific ways for over fifteen hundred years, through many generations, when the Lord Jesus was born. And although they had strayed from obedience to God, their culture was such that they really couldn’t imagine not living the way they had lived all that time.

And then the Savior came. And with Him came "an annulling of the former commandment." Everything they had imagined had changed. They felt, I’m sure, like pin balls being pushed around in a pin ball machine. What once had made sense now didn’t.

But here’s the thing: God didn’t change what He had done. He simply had (and always has had) a different perspective. It wasn’t that the rules had changed, but rather than people, in our limited capacity to see the future or to understand the past, just didn’t get it. The Jews just didn’t understand what God was doing. And what He was doing was making a way for everyone to be saved, not just the Jews. God was making a way so that all of us could be made perfect in the Lord Jesus Christ.

On a smaller scale, it’s the same for each of us. Life often doesn’t turn out the way we’d hoped or planned. Even when we make the best decisions possible, circumstances change abruptly and in a way that we couldn’t have even conceived . . . and all our plans and hopes go crashing. We can study and learn. We can think and consider. We can carefully make what seems like a totally wise decision . . . only to find ourselves facing complete chaos at the other end. How does that happen? It’s because God has a better plan for us.

There is a way to live in the midst of all of this:

"Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness. Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. . . The Lord knows the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. . . . The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delights in his way. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down; for the Lord upholds him with His hand" (Psalm 37:3-6, 18, 23-24 NKJV).

"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and He delights in his way." God delights in our lives when we allow HIM to order our days. And how much better would that be? To allow God to determine what we do, where we go, how we will live? He knows the beginning from the end and He delights in our lives when we allow Him to order our steps. What an amazing truth! When we allow God complete control over everything in our lives, "there is the bringing in of a better hope, through which we draw near to God."

　

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

Heaven Will Be Amazing! -- Amos 9:13-15

Amos 9:13-15


The Lord says, "The time is coming when there will be all kinds of food. People will still be harvesting crops when it’s time to plow again. People will still be taking the juice from grapes when it’s time to plant again. Wine will drip from the mountains and pour from the hills. I will bring my people Israel back from captivity; they will build the ruined cities again, and they will live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink the wine from them; they will plant gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant my people on their land, and they will not be pulled out again from the land which I have given them," says the Lord your God. (NCV)

I was reading an article the other day written by a hospice chaplain. The crux of the article was that, once we die, we will be without our bodies . . . and we will miss them.

"Too often, it's only as a patient realizes that he or she will lose their body that they finally appreciate how truly wonderful it is. . . . It isn't just health that [the dying] wish they had appreciated. It's the very experience of being in a body, something you likely take for granted until faced with the reality that you won't have a body soon. No matter what you believe happens after death, be it an afterlife, reincarnation or nothing at all, the fact remains: You will no longer be able to experience this world in this body, ever again." (From http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/16/health/dying-regret-body-hate/index.html).

And reading this article, I realized how wrong our doctrine is about death, how wrong our doctrine is about heaven, and how wrong our doctrine is about God Himself!

We—pastors, teachers, elders, Christians—need to talk more about what’s happening after this life. We need to read and learn and share about how flat this life really is compared to what it will be like to live eternally in God’s presence. We need to begin to focus on the reality of true life and stop hanging onto that which is temporarily and rather poorly functioning.

Paul Billheimer, in his book Destined for the Throne (a book every believer should read), claims that the sole and only purpose for creation was to create a Bride for the Son, a Bride that would rule and reign and be active in eternity forever with the Trinity forever, a Trinity that teems with creative power and desires, a Trinity that is resting from activity simply because They are waiting for their Bride, the Church:

"From the very beginning it was God’s plan and purpose that out of the riven side of His Son should come an Eternal Companion to sit by His side upon the throne of the universe, to share with Him His sovereign power and authority over His eternal kingdom. . . . This royalty and rulership is no hollow, empty, figurative, symbolic, or emblematic thing. It is not a figment of the imagination. The Church, the Bride, the Eternal Companion is to sit with Him on His throne. . . . We are joint heirs with Christ."

I think that we are defeated by this life because we fail to actually see what is coming. We default to dreaming about some kind of "future" here on this earth because our church leaders haven’t told us about how actually amazing and fantastic our lives will be in heaven. I think we have often become Christians because we don’t want hell rather than striving full energy toward an eternity that is more fabulous than we ever could imagine. "Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him" (1 Corinthians 2:9 NKJV).

The fact is, we will have bodies, but they will be bodies so much far superior to the ones we have now! Don’t you want a new body? A body that’s not subject to temptations or sickness or dying? Do you know that everyone is in the process of dying? This life is a terminal disease. Oh, we try to stave it off with eating certain things or exercising or medicines or surgeries. We try to look younger or act younger in the hope of pushing death further away. But the fact is, if we breath long enough, we will die from it. Breathing is a terminal act because at some point, we will stop breathing. "It is destined that each person dies only once and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27 NLT). We are destined to die. We are born dying. We wake up each day dying. This life is a dying proposition. And as such, we should understand the nature of these temporary bodies:

"For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down—when we die and leave these bodies—we will have a home in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long for the day when we will put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will not be spirits without bodies, but we will put on new heavenly bodies. Our dying bodies make us groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and have no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by everlasting life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. That is why we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord." (2 Corinthians 5:1-8 NLT).

Father God, even after His horrible judgment on the sinful Israelites, then promised that, once they had repented, He would bring them home, but not to the home they had known before. He was (and is) going to bring them home to a land that would never stop providing for them, a land that was so plentiful that need and work and want wouldn’t ever happen anymore. This is the God Who loves us! This is the God Who has promised us heavenly bodies, bodies that will be so far more superior than the ones we have. This is the fantastic, amazing, wonderful future that He has planned for us. Isn’t anything worth this? Is there anything you would still want to hang onto if it meant you would miss out on this kind of future? To describe heaven is to take every stupendously amazing and wonderful thing you have ever experienced, wrap them all up into one experience, and then know all that can’t begin to compare to one instant of what we have waiting for us. Father God is going to permanently plant us into His creation, but no longer as subjects. We will be reigning with Him, co-Rulers, as close as we can be to Him without becoming God. He has opened up His heart and His Throne for us! How can we not be looking forward to this?

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

God Cares What We Do - Amos 8:4-6

Amos 8:4-6


"Listen to me, you who walk on helpless people, you who are trying to destroy the poor people of this country, saying, ‘When will the New Moon festival be over so we can sell grain? When will the Sabbath be over so we can bring out wheat to sell? We can charge them more and give them less, and we can change the scales to cheat the people. We will buy poor people for silver, and needy people for the price of a pair of sandals. We will even sell the wheat that was swept up from the floor.’ The Lord has sworn by His name, the Pride of Jacob, ‘I will never forget everything that these people did.’" (NCV)

Yesterday, I bought a piece of wood. I needed it for a specific project and I needed it a certain size. The piece of wood I selected was advertised as being 4" high, but when I got it home and measured it, it was only 3-1/2" high (too small for the project I was doing). When I contacted the store, they explained to me that common measurements in lumber are now not what is advertised. For example, a 2x4 (which is supposed to be 2" by 4") is now 1-3/4" by 3-3/4". Of course, living in America I can tell you exactly why this has happened. It has happened because they can advertise it as the same product, charge more for it, and get more pieces of lumber out of the same tree because the pieces are now smaller. Companies do it all the time. They make the packaging slightly smaller and then raise the price slightly. It’s all about the profit margin. It’s all about making money.

The problem is that for rich people, it doesn’t matter. Even for those in the upper middle class, it’s still possible to maintain the same basic lifestyle. Just adjust a little. But if you are poor, if you are already doing without and without and without, having to try to figure out how to feed the same number of people with less food for more money is very difficult. And this kind of profit-making angers the Lord! "We can charge them more and give them less." The Lord says, "I will never forget everything that these people did."

There are two important aspects of this passage for believers. The first is that we have poor people around us. It doesn’t matter that they are poor because of bad decisions or poor lifestyles. The fact of the matter is that they are poor. They are having to do without, sometimes, the very basic things of life which can include food and housing. Maybe they are addicts who have embraced trying to hide from the pain of life. Maybe they are divorced and have lost the life they knew in the process of the marriage failure. Maybe they are simply the second or third or fourth generation of welfare recipients who don’t know anything else other than to get pregnant and apply for benefits.

It doesn’t matter!

God never put requirements on His love for us. In fact, "God shows His great love for us in this way: Christ died for us while we were still sinners" (Romans 5:8 NCV). We often repeat this verse, sometimes so easily, and yet we need to understand what it really means. "While we were still sinners." While we were rebelling against God. While we were His enemies! It is at this point that Christ died for us. The Father didn’t require us to clean up our act or even understand how we were supposed to be living. Christ just died and then came to meet us right where we were, in all of our hopelessness and sin. God expects us to reach out to those around us in the same way, right where they are! If they could "clean up," it’s likely they would. But they can’t, so they need us to come alongside and help, to support, to provide, to encourage, to pray. They need us because we are the Hands and Face of Jesus in the world. And we need to do this because these are the precious ones for whom the Lord Jesus died. He died for them! We need to be willing to reach out in love like He did.

The second aspect is that God cares about what we do, not just about what we believe. I’ve heard it said, from a number of people just before they run boldly into sin, that God sees their heart, somehow trying to justify that what they do isn’t nearly as important as what they believe. The fact is, what we do is a direct demonstration of what we believe. What we do comes from the beliefs within our hearts."Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies" (Matthew 15:19 NCV). The heart (what we believe) is directly related to our actions. In fact, it is impossible to sin unless that sin begins in our hearts!

So does God know our hearts? Absolutely! He knows that we love sex more than we love Him. He knows that we love pleasure more than we love Him. He knows that we love recreation more than we love Him. He knows that we love money more than we love Him. And anything that stands between us and God is a sin.

Amos clearly describes God’s words as God condemned, not what the Israelites believed (thought their belief structure was obviously skewed), but what they were doing! Our so-called belief structures can never be justification for our choosing sin. Our belief structures actually begin the sin. So if we think that we love God, we need to think again. "For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments" (1 John 5:3 NCV). Loving God is demonstrated in our choosing to obey Him, rather than embracing sin. We are either loving Him or loving sin. We are either moving toward Him or moving away from Him. There is no middle ground.

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

God Will Bring Punishment -- Amos 8:1-3

Amos 8:1-3


"This is what the Lord God showed me: a basket of summer fruit. He said to me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ I said, ‘A basket of summer fruit.’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘An end has come for my people Israel, because I will not overlook their sins anymore. On that day the palace songs will become funeral songs,’ says the Lord God. ‘There will be dead bodies thrown everywhere! Silence!’"

It has happened, frequently, within human history that two divergent paths have crossed, two very different plans, with one plan abruptly and brutally changing the other.

On December 7, 1941, a lazy Sunday morning, families got ready for church. Doctors and nurses left for what they believed would be an easy shift. A few naval officers prepared for a round of golf. The sun shone warmly on the city of Honolulu. All in all, there was nothing to indicate that this Sunday wouldn’t be like any other. However, a thousand miles away, Japanese carriers and pilots had totally different plans. They prepared for attack, for a battle that they hoped would cripple the American naval fleet long enough for Germany and Japan together to conquer most of the world. Two different plans. One abrupt, brutal convergence.

Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, people in New York woke up to their alarm clocks, turned on their TV’s to glance at CNN, grabbed a quick bagel and took off on the subways for work. Streets were teeming—as they always are in New York—with workers, tourists, and shoppers. The day was sunny, but cool, no clouds in the sky. Just a beautiful brisk New York fall day. But in two other cities, men were boarding planes, not to arrive in New York for business or pleasure, but with the purpose of destroying lives and buildings. Their hope was to bring about the collapse of the American economy. Two different plans. One abrupt, brutal convergence.

The twelve tribes of Israel had been in existence since they went to Egypt to escape the terrible famine that had hit Egypt and the surrounding countries. That was simply years and years and years ago. Since then, so much had happened. The Jews were in Egypt for 400 years, then God miraculously freed them. Forty years wandering in the desert and then coming home to the Promised Land. A time of being ruled by judges and prophets and then the time of the kings. Eventually, the country was split into two: Judah and Israel. And through it all, the people of Israel had survived. They were firmly entrenched in the land. They had homes and culture, thriving enterprise and trade with other countries. They had even been chastised by the Lord—many times—and yet nothing truly devastating had actually happened to them. Throughout it all, they had survived as a people.

There was no way that life as they had known it simply wouldn’t go on.

What the Israelites didn’t believe—refused to believe—was that God’s warning of destruction would be carried out. God wasn’t going to be thwarted. And within a generation, the nation of Israel would cease to exist completely, never again to become a whole nation. The ten tribes that made up Israel would be scattered, only to be brought together again in the very last days of humanity.

God will not be mocked. He is the Builder and Destroyer of nations. "All of you must yield to the government rulers. No one rules unless God has given him the power to rule, and no one rules now without that power from God" (Romans 13:1 NCV). God establishes nations and He pulls them down. If we fail to believe that, we may then fail to believe that He has the power to wield punishment upon us for our sin. The Israelites had talked themselves into believing that they were the "chosen" of God and, as such, God would never actually destroy them as He had threatened. And because they failed to believe His warnings—His many, many warnings—they continued in their sin.

There are Christians today (and I only call them Christians because that is how they self-identify) that believe they can continue in their sins, that God is so loving and so gracious that He will forgive even when they willingly choose to disobey Him. I have heard them say, "God knows my heart," and yet they have already determined to commit fornication or lying or deception or any number of sins.

Yes, God does know our hearts, and He knows when we love ourselves and our creature pleasures more than Him. He knows when we plan to satisfy our own lusts rather than to embrace the self-control of the Holy Spirit. He knows when we use grace as an excuse to sin again . . . and again . . . and again.

And He is not pleased!

God is ever loving, ever merciful, and ever forgiving. But that forgiveness comes with a price that we must pay. We must confess our sins! "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9 NKJV). To confess—homolegeo—means "to confess by way of admitting oneself guilty of what one is accused of, the result of inward conviction, such confession being the effect of deep conviction of facts" (Vine’s G3670, emphasis mine).

We cannot confess without being deeply convicted of the wrongness of our sin. And we cannot be deeply convicted of that wrongness without opening up our conscience to the fact that God has called us as His children to do other than what we have chosen to do. In other words, we must repent! We must turn around; we must in the future make different choices. We must begin to move toward God. Every sin is a step away from Him. If we want to be forgiven, we must want to move toward Him, to put aside our sin and determine never to do it again.

The fact remains . . . when we sin, God is not pleased! And He will not withhold His punishment from us forever. Even in His love, "the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes those He accepts as His children" (Hebrews 12:6 NLT). He will warn . . . and warn . . . and warn . . . and then He will punish because He loves us. He will bring about that kind of abrupt change in our lives that was seen by America at Pearl Harbor and on 9-11. This is the kind of abrupt change that was experienced by the Israelites because they refused to obey Him. Their country was destroyed!

We are hearing the warnings. And as we hear them—from sermons and books, from preachers and prophets, and from the Spirit Himself—it is time to turn away from our sin and to move, one step at a time, toward our Loving Father. It is time to want to please Him!

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com