I have struggled with the concept of sin for a very long time. You see, when I heard sin I hear “evil” and “bad”. I have not been able to separate being evil or bad from being a sinner. I could not understand the true concept of sin and it has held me back from God for a long time. When I was a child, my family and the other occult members that abused me, used the Bible and God’s Word against me. So words like sin and hell were reserved for times when I was disobeying and were used…
When I first came to Christ I was very leery of the idea of sin. For me, sin was something that was used to punish me. I was often told I was a sinner, which was equated to evil, bad, terrible, and holding a one-way ticket to hell. This wasn’t used as a segway into the need for Christ and the mercy and forgiveness He died to give us, it was used as a rod of discipline to keep me in line. The only forgiveness I heard about was being forgiven by obeying the adults in charge of me, and…
Last week I wrote a post about forgiveness, and I would like to follow it up with a post on how to forgive. Learning to forgive can be quite difficult for some people. It can seem as though forgiving someone is excusing every bad thing they have done to you. However, that is not how the Lord sees forgiveness. Jesus came to set us free from oppression and death, and when we hold on to unforgiveness, we are holding on to the very things that strive to keep us in bondage. For I consider that the sufferings of this present…