Well, as promised, here is the first blog in my renewed quest to be a faithful blogger!!
I spent a long time pondering what to write about. There are so many things that have happened in the past few weeks. Where should I start?
I decided to just start with what I learned today. I was reading in Isaiah 58, and I asked the
Lord, how can I (per v. 6) loosen bonds of wickedness, undo bands of yokes, let the oppressed go free, and break every yoke? What it says in v. 7 about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked seemed so much more tangible….
Well, the Lord responded by pointing out v. 2, “declare to my people their transgressions.” As I share the Gospel with people, I must include their sinfulness. Often, we encourage people to come to Jesus because God loves them. This is true, but the Gospel is so much more than that.
The Gospel says, YOU ARE A SINNER, AND THAT IS A BIG PROBLEM. YOU ARE IN DESPERATE NEED OF A SAVIOR. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO??!
Then it gets worse and says, WAIT, THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO. NOTHING YOU CAN DO CAN SOLVE YOUR PROBLEM. YOU HAVE NO HOPE.
EXCEPT
For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son….
The Gospel brings hope, yes, of course it does, but what good is hope if a person does not realize that he is hopeless?
So then, breaking bonds and yokes is accomplished by pointing out people’s sinfulness and need of a Savior. Then, people will come to Christ, and HE will snap every bond and break every yoke. What great news!!
Let me not stop there, let me tell you how God brought this message from Isaiah 58:1 home to my heart. Just yesterday, I was sharing the Gospel with an eight year old and a ten year old as they played on my living room floor. We were drawing Bible stories and ended up talking about Heaven and H-E-L-L (carefully spelled out because saying the word might make something bad happen…). These two girls were very concerned about getting to Heaven, but they reasoned that they had to be good enough to get there.
I started to talk about the Bible’s teaching that no one is good enough to get to heaven because we all sin. This is when the ten year old interrupted me and informed me that she does not sin. She used to when she was little, but that doesn’t count because she was little. Now, she doesn’t sin anymore so she is definitely good enough to go to heaven.
I meant to go on with my conversation and talk about the exciting news that Jesus takes care of the problem of our sinfulness, but I realized that I couldn’t. What’s the point of a Savior for a little girl who thinks she’s not sinful?? Our conversation had to address that issue first.
For now, the girl still thinks she’s perfect, and we must pray that God opens her eyes to the truth. However, that incident illustrates perfectly what I learned this morning. If we want people to be free in Christ, we must “declare to My people their sins.”
