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Friday, June 24, 2011

Renewal and Salvation

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-"For the wages of sin is death..."-Romans 6: 23

Short and sweet.  Paul pulls no punches, makes no qualifications, offers no refuge.  Sin=death.  Think about what he is saying here.  If we think of life as an economy, as if it were a job itself, then we can see quite quickly that everything we do has some sort of payoff, a wage.  When I sleep at night, the wage is energy in the morning.  When I watch baseball, the wage is escape.  When I worship God, the wage is joy.  You see the relationship; nothing you do is value neutral in your life.  Nothing.  Paul, recognizing this, points out a simple truth.  That the wages of sin, the value of it in our lives, is eventually death.  He pulls back the curtain on our darksides.

All of us do things we should not do.  Some of these things are more significant than others, but nonetheless we all have them.  And they all pay off for us in some way, or we think we do.  But lost amidst our payments for sin is the greater truth, if we persist in our sins, accept them as ours and make no efforts to change the worst parts of ourselves, then the eventual outcome is death. Not merely the death which leads to a funeral, but worse, the death of relationships, the death of our self respect, the death of our relationship with God.  These things have lives, just as we have lives, and when we allow sin to take root in our lives, we put these things at risk.  And Paul reminds us of that which we do not want to hear...sin leads to death.  When we sin, things die. 

Prayer:  Holy God, please help me to see clearly the areas of my life in need of renewal and salvation. Help me to see my failures and my sin, that through my faith in you, I might be set free from sin, and made alive to what is good.  I pray in Jesus' name.  Amen.

[Phillip Blackburn, Fist Presbyterian Church]

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