Enjoy Life, Enjoy God

CLEAN UP OUR ACT

April 15, 2009

 Forgiveness is a central joy of the good news of faith in Christ. Still there is a call, like Jesus told the woman in John 8, "Go and sin no more."

Those who are born of God will not continue to sin, because God's seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.
- 1 John 3:9 TNIV

But Christians continue to sin, don't we? Yet here we are told that we have a seed growing in each of us that stirs in our soul wooing us to faithfulness, obedience, to clean up our act. This house-cleaning, this life-cleaning is not out of obligation and guilt, but a response of gratitude. The old saints of the church called it, "the mortification of sin," in other words, the killing of sin in our lives.

John writes to his loved ones of the need to clean up our act. Forgiveness, yes, in Christ we have it. But with forgiveness, we long to be the people Christ freed us to be.
Joyfully,

Dale Patterson