Sinners and Unafraid

Thoughts from my reading in Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy by Paul David Tripp. Devotional is indented.


. . . according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy. Psalm 51:1

The older you get the more you move from being an astronaut to an archaeologist. When you're young, you're excitedly launching to worlds unknown. You have all of the major decisions of life before you, and you can spend your time assessing your potential and considering opportunities. It's a time of exploration and discovery. It's a time to go where you've never been before and to do what you've never done. It's a time to begin to use your training and to gain experience. But as you get older, you begin to look back at least as much as you look forward. As you look back, you tend to dig through the mound of the civilization that was your past life, looking for pottery shards of thoughts, desires, choices, actions, words, decisions, relationships, and situations. And as you do this, you can't help but assess how you have done with what you have been given.

In one sense, I think part of maturity is when you look at the whole picture. Of course, some of the "whole picture" is things that didn’t go right, bad decisions, broken relationships, and other things that can be hard to face.

If you and I are at all willing to humbly and honestly look at our lives, we will be forced to conclude that we are flawed human beings. And yet we don't have to beat our selves up. We don't have to work to minimize or deny our failures. We don't have to be defensive when our weaknesses are revealed. We don't have to rewrite our own histories to make ourselves look better than we actually were. We don't have to be paralyzed by remorse and regret.

This is one of the amazing things God has done for us: the price for sin has been paid and all the guilt and shame can be gone. When we understand this we are free to live with the reality of our life. We don’t have to hide what we did or were and our past doesn’t have to invade the present.

Here is a question from the meditation:

Is there a place in your life where you are still holding on to regret even though God has forgiven you and does not respond to you based on your past performance?

Of things that come to mind, I don’t have a problem with receiving God’s forgiveness and I don’t view Him as holding a grudge. Sometimes what gets to me is when I see the effect that my behavior or actions had on someone else. That can be hard to let go of.

Philip
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