Jesus Promises to Carry Our Sins
Are you taking Jesus up on carrying your sins?
Verse of the Day
‘He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed.’
Today’s Devotional
Imagine that you have a disease, and it is fatal if left untreated. You are told that there is a medicine that will eradicate the current level of disease in your body, and then there is a daily medication you will need to take for the rest of your life to kill any new diseased cells as they appear. Would you take the medication as prescribed?
Given that example, we can easily see that only a fool wouldn’t follow the protocol.
But with regard to our spiritual malady, what do we do?
Our initial dose of spiritual medication is accepting Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Our daily medication is spending time with God, confessing our sins, and leaving those sins at the foot of the cross.
But sometimes, we take our “diseased cells”, our sin, and we carry them around with us. They are dead, according to God, because Jesus took them to the cross. And we try to believe conceptually that these sins are dead, but they don’t seem dead to us, so we carry them around with us. Which causes all sorts of other problems.
This is a pretty gross example, but what if your hand was severed in an accident? Would you then carry your severed hand around with you? If you did that, the dead and decaying cells would attack your still living flesh.
Holding any sin apart and believing that it is not forgivable is the equivalent of carrying around your severed hand.
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God who died for your sins, then those sins are dead. Carrying them with you will only cause damage. It’s time to put them down. There is no sin that is not forgiven and forgivable for someone who believes in Jesus.
I heard in a sermon recently that the narrow gate that Jesus invites us to enter is narrow because it doesn’t allow us to carry our baggage through with us. (Mathew 7:13-14) Jesus also tells us that the gate is very narrow and leads to a difficult road. So He knew that putting our sins down and allowing Him to carry them would be difficult for us.
For today, I’d like to choose to believe this promise that Jesus carried my sins to the cross and killed them. And in doing that, He set me free to live in a way that honors His sacrifice, which I cannot do if I’m still holding onto the sins that He died for.
Journal Prompts
Answer only the questions that seem relevant to you today.
Are there any sins that we still carry with you? How can you leave those sins at the cross today?
If there are past sins that plague you, ask God to help you to see your past the way He sees it – covered in the blood of Jesus.
How can you live for what is right today?
What would it look like if you fully embraced your freedom from sin and your spiritual healing by Jesus’s wounds?