8-4-2023

Good Morning All,

   John 8:36;” So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.”

    14,671! I thought I paid better attention than that. I maintain two email accounts. The one that most of you receive this devotion from, the trinity57460 account and then my personal account, thatchurchguy. I tried to maintain them properly, apparently, I failed. I checked my spam file and found 10 so I deleted them. Then I checked the trash file, and it had 14,671 emails. I thought I checked it better than that. I hit the delete button and it just sat there and spun. I tried it 4 times and the same thing. I guess my computer can’t handle that mess. So, I started the task of deleting them a page at a time. 100 emails deleted at a time, I deleted about 2,000 and decided to move on then go back later for another round. 14,671 garbage emails, no wonder things were slow and bogged down. That is a lot of extra stuff to carry, and it is stuff I threw away! But not all the way, they remained and some still remain to slow down my computer and to bog things up.

    This is the way sin works in our lives as well. Scripture paints some wonderful images of what confession/forgiveness looks like. Leaving your sins at the altar or the cross, and God removing your sins as far as the east is from the west are a couple of my favorites. The idea is simple, we confess our sins, give them to God and then move on and forget about them. They are paid for, the debt is paid, there is no longer a need to keep a copy of the bill. Yet the devil wants you to keep them around, after all, guilt is a good thing for the devil to hang around your neck. How can you possibly think that God will love someone who has 14,671 sins in the trash file. How can you possibly think God would forgive that many sins? Maybe 1,000 or even 2,000 but 14,671? When God really looks at your trash file, what do you think he will do?

    What do you think God will do, just what He promised to do; to set us free! God is faithful and keeps his promise to set us free because of Jesus. God, who is loving and merciful, has chosen to love you, to redeem you and to make you his child. We do not need to carry around the guilt of sins forgiven, that only helps the devil. Those sins we hold onto give the devil ammunition to attack you and to make you doubt. Could I forgive someone who hurt me 14,671 times? I don’t know, but I know God does all out of love. In the collect for last Sunday, we prayed for “faith to receive what you have promised, so we can love what you have commanded.” We pray for faith that heals, faith that releases guilt, and a faith to walk according to God’s will. No matter how full your trash file of sins is, God has forgiven you through Jesus and gives you new hope and new life to live in His grace, clinging to His promise of eternal life. It is in this mercy we live.

Almighty and everlasting God, give us an increase of faith, hope, and love, that, receiving what You have promised, we may love what You have commanded; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret