The Grace and Forgiveness of God!

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us.” – Ephesians 1:3-8 NIV

When someone makes a mistake, it may be forgiven a couple of times. However, when people make the same kind of a mistake continually or take a while to learn a particular thing, sometimes temptation rises and frustration bursts out, and then start to blame that person. Nevertheless, there are some people who are willing to forgive whenever a person makes mistakes. For example, my mentor and I organised a movie day for Windsor Park Baptist Church. I was a technical person for this job but I made a big mistake by putting the disk between the computer’s hard drive and the container of it or something. Therefore, we could not watch “Pamela’s Prayer” on one of the movie days, so I apologised to my mentor and others several times. However, my mentor lovingly explained that it is not big of a deal. IT360 staff also were already planned to come to the church on following Monday so she could ask them to take the disk out. Overall, my mentor was filled with God’s grace.

The Oxford Bible Commentary states that God’s grace is the “fountainhead of all human well-being.” God has loved us so much as His children that He sacrificed His beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to break the bondage of sin and death, and to set us free (Hebrews 2:14-15). According to the Old Testament law, the forgiveness of God should be established with animal sacrifices (Hebrews 9:19-22). Hence, Christ came into the world as Passover lamb and offered His body as an atonement of our sins once for all. The Passover lamb was used to be the animal sacrifice that the Israelites used to cleanse their sins away with while they were in Egypt.

Since we automatically become the righteousness of God through faith in Christ, we should live in Him as well (2 Corinthians 5:21). Romans 6:13-14 reads, “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to him as an instrument of righteousness. For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.” I am not under the law but kind of am under the false grace. Because of God’s abundant grace, I become lazy, especially during my holidays. I know that my identity belongs to God through faith in Christ and I know that I have much things to do, such as writing devotionals and articles. However, I am not super disciplined in doing them. Because I haven’t finished writing devotionals or articles, I usually don’t have much time to read a book. Therefore, I need to work on disciplining myself to do God’s given task and work bit more on managing my time.

Meditate on Luke 22:14-20 and thank Jesus for His crucifixion and resurrection, and our redemption in Him. 2 Corinthians 5:17 declares, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”