Unconditional forgiveness

This is something that I’ve thought about and felt ever since I was a little kid, and I know I’m nowhere near a full appreciation of this amazing concept.

What I’m talking about is God’s incredible forbearance. He cannot settle for anything less than perfection, yet he shows mercy to us, His fundamentally flawed creation. Everything we do is tainted by sin, yet he has provided His Son to provide atonement for our sins, both conscious and unconscious.

Unconscious sin is what I’m most amazed about. God doesn’t stop with simply forgiving the sins that we repent of. We sin against Him in so many ways, and I think we often don’t even realize it. It seems impossible to pray to God without a hint of selfishness in our motives, yet He not only hears our prayers but answers them.

Can we really love others for totally unselfish reasons, or is our love polluted by the smallest amount of selfishness? I think it is impossible for us to be unselfish without Christ controlling our lives. We are too susceptible to loving others for what they will give us in return, or how other people will approve, or even simply how good we will feel about ourselves. Even as a true Christian I think it is so easy, simply through a lack of extreme vigilance, to sin without knowing it.  

We cannot do anything on our own that will please God. We can’t even go a single hour without sinning against Him, let alone a lifetime. Isaiah 64:6 says, “But we are all like an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” We sin continually, whether we realize it or not. And our sin totally separates us from God, whether we realize it or not. Only by God’s boundless grace, given to us through Jesus Christ, can we receive atonement for our sins. 

Hope

Occasionally a stream of connected thoughts about a particular topic will go through my head, and I’ll think, “I could write a mini-essay about this.” Or a blog post. These kinds of random, yet hopefully meaningful subjects will most likely be what this blog is about. I’ve had these thoughts about all different kinds of topics from religion to politics to sports to some amalgamation of the aforementioned. Unfortunately, the only one of these thought streams that I can remember I thought of in the past week. It happens to deal with the subject of hope, especially in the light of Christianity in our daily lives.

People live out their daily lives based on hope. Everyone wishes to someday attain their dreams of better status in life or better circumstances. I think that hope drives everyone, from the businessman working long hours, hoping to earn a promotion, to the political candidate campaigning, hoping to get elected, to the Christian living his or her life in the hope of entering heaven after death. Everyone hopes for something better in the future, and our hopes, whatever they are based on, keep us from despairing.

In my soccer game the other day, as the coach was talking to the team at halftime, he said something like, “Hope is not a viable strategy.” He was talking about our tendency in the first half to send the ball indiscriminately up the field and hope that a teammate will receive it and make a play. What he meant, obviously, was, “Be sure that your teammate is able to receive the ball and has somewhere to go with it.” In a sense, every play in soccer and all of sports is based on the hope that a teammate will be able to do something with the ball that will contribute to the team’s effort to score. But there is a huge difference between sending the ball up the field in the general direction of the goal, hoping your team will receive it, and purposefully passing to an open teammate who is making a run, hoping he can do something with the ball when he gets it. In other words, our hopes should be based on concrete ideas that give us reason to believe they will come about.   

It’s easy to lose hope. Many of our hopes disappoint us. People don’t come through for us when we need them. Events fall through. Even our dearest hopes, so obvious that we take them for granted, may come to nothing: a loved one may die, or a marriage may fall apart. But there is One that will never lose hope in us, and in turn we should never lose hope in Him. No matter how adverse our situation is, or how much we lose faith, God has promised to come through for us. Whether we lose a job, or lose a loved one, or simply feel too sinful, God’s grace and sufficiency never runs out. So, never lose hope.