is this post on purpose?

Yep. No mistake.

 

This post is about sinning on purpose.

 

That is to say I am purposely writing about the times we sin on purpose.

 

Psalm 19:12-13

 

¹² Who perceives his unintentional sins?
Cleanse me from my hidden faults.
¹³ Moreover, keep Your servant from willful sins;
do not let them rule over me.
Then I will be innocent
and cleansed from blatant rebellion.

 

We are so depraved, we sin without knowing it. We are, however, given insight enough to understand that we make more mistakes than we know; including mistaking how many mistakes we make.

 

We daily get into the grime of life and contribute muck to the mess. We crap on other people’s days and they poop on our parades. Round and round it goes and where it stops?God only knows.

 

Until then, we who by faith approach God through Christ deal with the daily reality of still falling short. Being born from above and renewed in one’s spirit by the Spirit still involves living in a body trained by the old man. And that old man does not learn new tricks well at all. He liked the old life. He was used to it.

 

There are sins we like doing. We want to do them. But we must ask God to assist us in conforming our minds more to His and agreeing with Him as to the nature and desirability of those things. We must grow and mature in becoming more like Him as we orchestrate our days around serving Him and denying ourselves.

 

Jesus picked up His Cross once and did it perfectly. He did not have to die to Himself. He chose to die for us. Because we live, we must die daily until we by grace enter His courts in Him fully.

We need to daily be protected from ourselves.

We are a work in progress.

The point I am hoping to highlight is not simply that we like sin.

That is obvious.

The point is that by God’s grace, when reborn, we desire righteousness.

Not that we do so at the exclusion of still wrestling with sin, but whereas before we could ONLY desire sin, we now can desire righteousness as well and war against the sinful desires inside us.

Even still, we sin.

And even still, He is faithful to forgive those who blatantly rebel against Him.

We were not forgiven our former sins solely because they were performed in ignorance.

Jesus died on purpose for the sins we do on purpose.

Jesus died for those sins we do by accident or without premeditation.

Jesus died for those sins we do not even realize that we did.

It is not a tit-for-tat confession-for-forgiveness formula. If so, we would have to have perfect knowledge of our imperfection in order to appease the perfect judgment of God.

Rather, we have a perfect Mediator who knows us perfectly and took on all imperfection in Himself that we might be called perfect by justifying imperfection without offending perfect justice.

Say that 37 times quickly!

The bad news is we fall shorter than we thought.

The Good News is God is more gracious than we ever imagined!