Just a taste

Jeanette is a grown woman now, a mother to her own children. But she still remembers years ago when her mother baked a chocolate cake for the church picnic her family was to attend. As Jeanette went out the back door, she saw the cake and gave it a test. She put her finger in to taste it. But, she admits that she wasn’t smart enough to cover it up. She just tasted and went outside.

Obviously, her mother was not happy. But it was her father who lined up all the children and asked, “Who did it?” Of course, none of the children confessed. Her father took each of the children into the kitchen, saving Jeanette for last since she was the oldest.

When he took her into the kitchen, he put her finger in the hole. Just as a leopard can’t change its spots, a third-grader can’t change her finger-size.

She had been discovered and was rightly punished.

Jeanette admits that she learned something that day. Even though she did her share of more bad things, she never told her father another lie. Her father knew that. Later, when Jeanette was confronted with doing something wrong and accused of lying, her father would say, “She may be guilty of a lot of things, but she’s not a liar.”

Each day we commit many, many sins. Some of those sins are willful disobedience. Some are accidental slip-ups. Some are just plain habit.

But all of those sins pull us farther and farther away from God. They damage our relationship with our heavenly Father. Those sins – whether they are great or small, willful or accidental – they are all damning.

We are guilty of many sins. Each day the Lord discovers those sins. We may be satisfied with our sinful lifestyle, but our God certainly is not!

God will condemn us if He must. However, God’s great desire is to deliver us from sin through repentance and faith. When Jesus met with the woman caught in adultery, He did not condemn her for her sins. But He did not condone her sins, either!

He said, “Go now, and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). He called upon her to repent and change her sinful life. Jeanette Eaton did that many years ago. She still admitted that she sinned and messed up. However, she refused to ever commit the sin of lying to her father.

I wonder how many of us can say, “I learned something that day”? I wonder how many of us can profess, “I never did that sin again”?

It would be a good thing if we did. You see, repentance is not just being sorry for what we’ve done in the past. Repentance is striving not to repeat the sin in the future.

It’s the second part of repentance that’s hard. It’s the second part that we are all going to have to work at.

Each day we commit a myriad of sins. But each day the Lord uncovers those sins and forgives them because of His Son’s sacrifice.

The Lord’s forgiveness does not give us a license to sin. Rather, the Lord’s forgiveness should make us sorry enough to leave those sins and habits behind and work at not committing them ever again.

The season of Lent is all about helping you with your repentance. We are all great sinners, but God’s forgiveness is so much greater. We need more time to reflect upon our repentance. We need more time to rejoice in Christ’s forgiveness.

Rejoice and repent with us on Sunday mornings in Lent, at our midweek Lenten services on Wednesday evenings at 6:30 pm, and then throughout all of Holy Week.

Sin in any form is never justifiable, and the justified sinner, trusting in Jesus, will repent and shun all sin.

Rejoicing in repentance,

Pastor Michael Zarling