Advent Devotional #8: Joy
“Do I believe that Jesus has taken away my sins and cast them as a stone into the depth of the sea?”
by Rev. Justin LaRosa from Almost Christmas: Devotions for the Season
Can you affirmatively proclaim, “Yes, I believe!” to Wesley’s question?
If you cannot, you have yet to soak in God’s radical grace revealed in Jesus.
Until the age of 9, I was in church about every Sunday due to the efforts and faithfulness of my grandparents. They ushered me to Wednesday night children’s programming and vacation Bible school. But somehow the God I came to believe in was one who kept a strict ledger of wrongs and rights. It wasn’t the God that the church taught, but it is the God I constructed. The “wrongs” side of the ledger began to grow exponentially due to my budding addiction. Broken relationships, self-hatred, and life wreckage followed me like a shadow. Imagining God removing them was unfathomable.
I suspect John Wesley asked this question because for much of his life he couldn’t affirm it. He wanted to but was unable. Condemnation stubbornly hung over him like a thick morning fog. Even though his life was filled with good works and he was an ordained Anglican priest, somehow he was never convinced of Christ’s forgiveness. He knew the Bible. He preached and taught it. Even with the information about Jesus taking his sins away firmly planted into his head, it hadn’t fully blossomed in his heart. It wasn’t until his profound Aldersgate experience that his whole attitude and outlook were transformed.
Pushing through resistance to go to a small group gathering, John listened to Martin Luther’s preface to Romans. He described it this way:
“While he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and save me from the law of sin and death.”
I don’t know why it took Wesley, who had the appearance of a very holy life, so long to experience something in his heart that was so drilled into his head.
Perhaps it is because the claim of the gospel is audacious. Jesus takes away all of our sins. All of them. Every. Single. One. Everything you have done; everything you have failed to do; every unsanctified thought; every attitude or action that has wounded others, yourself, or the world are forgiven and forgotten by the power of Jesus Christ. That’s the power that we expect to come to us on Christmas when Christ is born. That’s the power that is already at work among us.
Seem preposterous? It is - until it isn’t. God’s grace penetrates our previously constructed ideas so that we can experience it deep within.
One Aldersgate experience happened to me while listening to a sermon. The preacher used a vivid illustration about forgiveness and a dead armadillo on the side of the road. And although I can’t remember the details of the sermon, I knew in that moment that Jesus had forgiven me for everything. And even now, when I see a dead armadillo, I remember that Jesus has taken my sins and cast them as a stone into the depths of the sea.
Wesley couldn’t manufacture the moment before it came. Neither could I. And neither wil you. But God’s grace relentlessly pursues us. God doesn’t define us by our worst moments and tendencies, but rather God realigns us through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. That is the very purpose for which Christ was born. That is what we celebrate.
And while it is an unpleasant exercise to reflect upon one’s sins, failures, and brokenness, it reveals something beautiful: the depts of God’s love for you and for all of humanity.
Yes, I believe.
How about you?
Reflection:
Can you say “yes, I believe?” to Wesley’s question?
Where is there joy in the knowledge that God’s grace has covered you?