Thursday, March 31, 2016
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Then he
said, “When I was with you before, I told you that everything written
about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must be
fulfilled.” Then
he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures. And he said, “Yes, it
was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the
dead on the third day. It
was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of his
name to all the nations, beginning in Jerusalem: ‘There is forgiveness of
sins for all who repent.’ You
are witnesses of all these things. Luke
24:44-48(NLT)
When Jesus
appeared to his disciples after the resurrection, it took a while for some of
them to fully grasp that he wasn’t dead.
I can easily imagine the dropped jaws and that doe-in-the-headlights-look
on their faces.
As the two
Emmaus travelers were rehearsing their encounter with Jesus he was suddenly just
there! They thought he was a
ghost. Jesus encouraged them to feel
with their own hands the places where nails and a spear had pierced him. And when they’d been assured they weren’t
dealing with a ghostly spectre, but the risen Christ, Jesus then began to help
them understand the meaning of everything they’d been through since the day
they met him.
In teaching
them, it all came down to:
‘There is forgiveness of sins for all who
repent.’ You
are witnesses of all these things.
Luke
24:47b-48(NLT)
Peter would
later preach that exact message:
Now repent
of your sins and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped away. Acts 3:19(NLT)
That message
hasn’t changed; even today, when sinners repent they are forgiven and become
witnesses of the Lord’s love, forgiveness and power.
Throughout
the centuries since Jesus’ resurrection and appearance to the disciples, the
message hasn’t changed, but it has been blurred at times. Too often, perhaps in our haste to be
released from the penalty of our sins, we slide into accepting forgiveness without
genuine repentance. The evidence of this
is the “backslider” – those who have expressed an interest in God, claimed
forgiveness, and then live like nothing is changed.
It makes me wonder
if, in our modern era, we did well in doing away with the mourner’s bench. The “bench,” although a 19th
century addition to church life, is actually a throwback to John the Baptist
warning those who came to him for forgiveness, to not put the cart
of being forgiven ahead of the horse of repentance.
Repentance always comes first.
Prove by the way you live that you have repented
of your sins and turned to God.
Matthew 3:8(NLT)
The bench was
a place for seekers to work through their intentions in coming to Christ. Herschel Hobbs, the great Baptist preacher
and speaker on the Baptist Hour for many years was fond of saying: there’s never been a sin too big for God to
forgive, except the unconfessed one.[2]
Now,
honestly, I don’t advocate bringing back the mourners bench, because there were
abuses by those in power in the church.
Some ministers and church officials used the bench as a shaming tool
towards those whom they wanted to control.
However, we
ought not take sin too lightly – and its inherent result which is insulting God’s
holiness. The darkness of our sins should
create at least something of a mourner’s caution, if not a public bench; there
ought to be solemnity about repentance, which is befitting of that which causes
death. That backdrop of sackcloth
and ashes in the one who repents highlights that much more joy when
forgiveness births a sinner from death unto life!
It makes the
witness of the resurrection that much more powerful!
For You Today
Did the presence of the
living Lord make your jaw drop when you realized your sins could be forgiven?
[1] Title Image: William Blake [Public domain], via Wikimedia
Commons
[2]
He said four or five
times to an early morning study group at First Baptist Church, Crystal River in
1979
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