Enjoy today's chapter:
2 Corinthians 5:19-21
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.
And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ's ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us.
We speak for Christ when we plead, "Come back to God!"
For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.
(New Living Translation)
Sin's Brood 4
The next two paragraphs of Paul's letter to the Romans are devoted to that particular sort of unnatural sin first suggested to man after his disobedience, and which in all time and all lands has been and is the worst, the most unnatural, the most degrading, and the most common.
It came first in the imagination. It came early in the history of actual sin. It is put first by Paul in his arraignment here. He gives it chief place by position and by particularity of description. First was the using of a pure, natural function to gratify unnatural desires.
Then with strange cunning and lustful ingenuity changing the natural functions to uses not in the plan of nature. Let it all be said in lowest, softest voice, so sadly awful is the recital. Yet let that soft voice be very distinct, that the truth may be known.
Then lower down yet the commercializing of such things. Unconcerned barter and trade in man's holy, most potent function. Putting highest price on most ingenious impurity.
Then follows the longest of these paragraphs running up and down the grimy gamut of sin.
Beginning with all unrighteousness, he goes on to specify depravity, greedy covetousness, maliciousness.
Oozing out of every pore there are envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity.
Human beings are whisperers, backbiters, God-haters, and self-lovers, in that they are insolent, haughty, boastful.
They are inventors of evil things, without understanding, breakers of faith, without natural affection, ruthlessly merciless.
The climax is reached in this, that though they know God, and what He has set as the right rule of life, they not only do these things named, but they delight in the fellowship of those who habitually practise them.
The stage of impulsiveness is wholly gone.
They have settled down to this as the deliberate choice and habit of life.
Mankind is still a king, but all mired in the filth of sin.
He is the image and glory of God, but how shrivelled and withered; obscured, all overgrown with ugly poison vines. |
A Prayer for Today
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