June 20
"You have heard that it was said to those of old, 'You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.' But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Raca!' shall be in danger of the council. But whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be in danger of hell fire,” Matthew 5:21, 22.
Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ came to earth to deliver us from sin. He did that by taking every sin committed by every man, woman, child who has ever lived upon Himself. The only HOLY, SINLESS PERSON who has ever walked the earth has made Himself sin for us so we may be sinless before God.
Jesus not only took our sin, but He redefined our sin. In the above passage He makes it perfectly clear that sin does not constitute merely what we do, but it is what we think; it is who we are in the inner man of our selfhood.
He tells us that if we indulge hatred, we are like murderers in the mind of God. To carry that to its ultimate, humanly impossible source, allow me to relate a story told originally by Charles Colson in one of his wonderful books on Christianity.
Our Brother Colson told the story of a wealthy man, an heir to the Coors Beer fortune being murdered in the process of a robbery. The perpetrator was ultimately apprehended, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. The son of the slain man, a believer in Christ, felt led of the Lord to go to the prison to visit the man who had murdered his father and to share the Gospel with him. The young man did so on several occasions and ultimately let his father’s murderer to salvation. Not only that, but he returned again and again to study the Bible with him and nurture him in the truths of the Word that are eternal.
Another poignant story of forgiveness was told by Corry Ten Boom. That godly and wonderful woman had been held in a Nazi concentration camp along with her beloved sister Betsy during the Holocaust of WWII. Both women endured much suffering at the hands of the sadistic guards. Betsy died under the cruel treatment that was meted out in that cruel time and place but Corry lived and traveled the globe sharing the beauty of the Gospel and forgiveness in Christ.
At one of her seminars, after she had shared her story and invited people forward for prayer she was met by a man who identified himself and whom she recognized as one of the evil guards at the concentration camp where she and her sister were abused. The man told her he had become a Christian and asked her to forgive him.
She was constricted within herself at the thought of being confronted with one who had perpetrated such evil against her and Betsy who she loved so dearly, but when the Holy Spirit came upon her, the forgiveness that he sought flowed from her!
Corry experienced a true release from all the evil that had beset her and her family and her country at an awful epoch of history. She understood that for her to continue to hate the man and to hold his sin against him would have been as bad in the eyes of God as was his horrific sin!
How can such an assertion be made? From man’s vantage point, it makes no sense, but from God’s point of view it does because all sin is evil in His eyes in that all sin separates a man from God.
Ephesians 2:8 says, “By grace are you saved through faith, it is the gift of God not of works, lest any man should boast.” This makes it clear that there is nothing we can do to earn our own salvation. We can only place ourselves at the feet of Jesus and allow His grace as demonstrated by His sacrifice on the cross, to make us clean, to make us new, to make us holy before Him.
With that truth settled in our hearts, let us then allow ourselves to be cleansed from the sin of our minds that is as offensive to the Lord as is the commission of the deed.
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