Beloved Children
“God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Luke 18:13
It is really hard to admit it when we’re wrong. I mean, who doesn’t like to be right? We try to make up excuses or blame other people for things that were really our fault. By nature we are prideful and think too highly of ourselves.
There was one time when I was little that I ate all the icing out of our Oreos, stuck them back together and put them back in the package. My mom thought that my older sister did it and she got in trouble. When I finally fessed up, I tried to make excuses for why I thought it was okay to just eat the icing…like that I didn’t want to waste the cookie. It was so hard for me to just say I was sorry and should not have done what I did, but that was hard to do because I was embarrassed that I was in trouble.
The fact is we are all sinners, and accepting that and seeing our sin is the first step in realizing how desperately we need God’s love and how merciful God is.
In Tim Keller’s book Reason For God, he has a great quote about the sinfulness of humans. He says that we are “more wicked than we ever dared believe, but more loved and accepted in Christ than we ever dared hope.” It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around both these concepts.
Because of the fall, humans became wicked. We put ourselves before God and disobeyed Him and sin came into the world. But because of Christ we are loved and accepted more than we can imagine. Thank the good Lord for that. And even better, nothing we do can ever stop God from loving us. Because Christ died for us, God sees us not as sinners, but as His beloved children. Be thankful to God for His mercy and love.