Week 50—Friday 1 Corinthians 1:26-30
Week 50—FRIDAY
FUNDAMENTAL TENDENCIES:
FORGIVENESS AND A SECOND CHANCE
Another fundamental tendency: Fifth, the need to forgive and be forgiven. There is a redemptive strain running through the universe. If a hillside is scarred by torrential rains Nature sets to work to cover the scars with trees and flowers. If a bone is broken, Nature makes the broken place far stronger than before. Said a woman to a doctor, “With all these germs I don’t see how anybody could be well,” and got the reply, “Knowing the body with all its provisions toward warding off disease and to recover when diseased, I don’t see why anybody should ever be sick.” There is a fundamental tendency in the universe toward forgiveness and recovery, toward redemption. That fundamental tendency came to its highest manifestation in the cross where God identifies with our sin, takes it, and offers us forgiveness in a nail-pierced Hand. As God forgives so we are to forgive. “Treat one another as you are treated in Christ.”
Sixth, the fundamental tendency toward a new birth, a new beginning. There is a fundamental tendency in the universe to give the second chance, a recovery, a new start. This comes to its supreme manifestation in Jesus—he took the nobodies and turned them into the somebodies, made a new world beginning out of cast-off material, threw open the gates of possibility to the impossible. “Recovery,” “Transformation” are the twin words written across the whole of the life and purpose of Jesus. “Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they wondered; and they recognized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13). The worms had come out of their chrysalis and were soaring to the astonishment of all—and their own!
O Jesus, this is the most precious thing about you. You bring the gospel of the Second Chance. You do not despair of us so we must despair of no person. Help us to treat people as you treat us. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: “There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”