A short reading and prayer for today
Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 7:24-25 NLT
It’s a great privilege when someone shares their inner struggles. It isn’t easy to talk about the battles that go on in our lives, but here Paul let it all pour out! Here this mature Christian leader and brilliant teacher admitted that, although he wanted to do what was right, he often found himself doing the precise opposite. He recognised that there was a power inside him that encouraged him to be a slave of sin. It was an agonising dilemma and it left him feeling very miserable. But here he celebrated the fact that sin didn’t have to have the last word. And the answer was Jesus. By looking to Jesus and placing his trust in him he could find the liberty that he craved.
The problem with sin is that it keeps knocking at the door of our lives. However long we may have been a Christian it keeps having a go, trying to find a foothold in our thoughts, words and actions. Paul’s astonishingly blunt words remind us that we need to be absolutely honest about ourselves. We can become very good at putting on an act, and trying to make it look as if we’re fine when we know that we are battling with sin in our lives. It isn’t difficult to deceive other people, but we can’t fool ourselves and will never fool God. We need to take a leaf out of Paul’s book and look at ourselves in the mirror.
God is never in the business of humiliating us. As we own up to our sin, and claim his gift of forgiveness, he delights to set us free and to open the door to life.
QUESTION
Are you willing to be totally honest with God today?
PRAYER
Lord God our Father, I thank you with everything in me that, through Jesus’ death on the cross, I can be set free from all of my sins. Amen
Photo – Mussenden Temple, Downhill, Castlerock