Wednesday, July 26, 2023

Mark 1:14-15

Mark 1:14-15 

  If you decide you love being healthy, you might have to give up donuts.  But if you love health enough, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice, because you're moving towards something.  
  Jesus loves us as we are... but he still calls us to change.  Being a Christian means we live in active repentance -- Christ doesn't call us to stay the way we are.  Christ calls us to repent, for each and every one of us is captive to sin, and it shows itself in different ways.  We repent not to earn the love of God -- that's given as a free gift -- but we do it as a response to Christ's love.  When Christ's love transforms us, we naturally want to be rid of every aspect of sin in our lives, so we turn from sin and all of its influences.  Sin pulls us away from Jesus and puts things between us.  It's a daily task required of us, to pay attention to the influence of sin in our lives.  It's a spiritual discipline to stop at the end of every day, to look back and see where sin led us from Jesus, and to pray for Holy Spirit wisdom to move away from sin and back towards Christ.
  

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