God's Sacrifice

I don't think there's a person among us who has ever believed the Gospel, even a little bit, and not ended up neurotic about sin...at least, to some degree. It is lectured into our heads and our hearts that we are sinners, through and through, and that if we look in the mirror, we see a sinner looking back at us and that even if we're tempted to think we are "not that bad," we are the worst of the worst because if you've broken the smallest letter of God's law, then you've broken all of it. 

And I think that I speak for nearly all of us (if not all of us entirely) when I say that when we at first hear this, when we at first take seriously the deathly nature of sin and accept the fact that we are not actually perfect, we enter into a sort of hypervigilance for a season - viciously examining everything we do and looking at our hearts and praying deep, desperate prayer because we felt like we were still good persons today, but somewhere, the truth keeps ringing in our hearts that nope...we're still sinners. 

Even if we cannot think of a single terrible thing that we did. 

(A side note on sin: once we come to understand the true heart of God, we understand that even that one little thought that passed briefly through our head reveals that we are not a perfectly God-centered as we thought we were. For out of the depths of the being, these thoughts arise, and that means that something in us is not quite right. But then again, we're human - we know we're not quite right. That's the whole point of the cross.) 

For those of us who have wrestled with this, and those of us who still wrestle with this, there is good news and there is bad news. 

And that news is this: God has a sacrifice for the sin you don't even know about. (Ezekiel 45:10)

This is bad news because it confirms our worst fear about ourselves - we really are sinners. We really have done things we don't know about. We really have messed up more than we think we have. We have, in fact, broken not just God's law, but God's heart. We are sinners. 

But this is also good news. Because it reminds us that God knows the things we don't know, understands the things we don't understand, and has already loved us ahead of time by giving us the blood of His Son that covers all our sin, including the stuff we don't even know about. Including the stuff that a thousand years of introspection might not ever make us conscious of. Including the stuff we simply haven't accounted for. 

The cross is not merely sufficient, although that would be enough; it is also gracious. The blood of Christ flows beyond our conscious understanding and covers all of our being...because God desires so thoroughly to be with us. 

And that's good news, no matter how you look at it.