Part of the amazing experience of getting saved is the simplicity of it. All you have to do is to believe that Jesus came as the Son of God and died on his cross in order to redeem you and me from our sins and ask him for forgiveness.
Yet as simple as salvation is, sin itself is the opposite it is extremely complicated. For example, why was sin such a destructive force that the son of God had to die because of it. And why does it seem that after we get saved that sin is an even more powerful and continuous force that tries to come between us and God?
The reasons are many, but the most important of them is simply this. When Jesus died on the cross for our sins, he paid for all of those sins from the past and all sins that would ever be committed in the future. Christ will not be crucified twice, we must remember that every time that we sin.
A perfect example of this would be Peter and what Jesus said to him in Matthew 16:18
“And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. I can only imagine how much of a sense of pride and purpose Peter carried around with him after Jesus told him that, can you imagine if Jesus told you that you were going to be his rock and build his church, you would probably feel like there was nothing you could do wrong. Yet only a short time later, Jesus warned Peter that he would deny him three times before the rooster crowed. Peter’s response to Jesus was. “I will not deny you, Lord, even if I have to die with you. Of course, he did deny him three times and didn’t even follow him to watch him die on the cross. why not? Was it only out of fear or shame? It was because of this verse in Matthew 10:32 “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven. Jesus, saying this, must have replayed over and over and over again in his head.
This was such a pivotal and powerful moment that it is recorded in all four of the gospels that Peter denied being one of his disciples three times. And wept afterward and did not even believe Mary when she told him that Jesus was risen and not in the tomb. But only in Mark 16:7 it says “go, tell his disciples (and Peter) that he is going before you into Galilee, there you will see him, as he said to you” Peter had not been abandoned, he had not been left an orphan as Jesus promised his disciples he would not leave them, or abandon them. Peter had abandoned being called a disciple by denying three times that he was one, but Jesus never abandoned him. This means that just as Jesus told Peter that he would deny him three times before he died on that cross and before he paid for the sins of the world. He paid for Peters sins in advance just as he has paid for all of ours. Jesus was the Son of God because he was born just as we are in a human body and bound by the very same time and laws of nature that we are. But he was also God in that he said “ I AM ” the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. When he asked the Father in. Luke 23:34 “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” it had already been granted before he even asked it because he and the Father are one, he only said it out loud so that all would know they had been forgiven because the Son had asked it of the Father who loves the Son. This means that Jesus was not just a man because he was there at the very beggining and he has already seen the end which means that he had already seen and known each and every one of us and each of our sins that we have and will commit, yet he loved us and chose to go to that cross and paid the price for us anyway. There is nothing we can do to redeem ourselves of sins, no amount of good deeds can undo the things that we have done or secure for us forgiveness for the sins that we will do in the future.
However we have to acknowledge and understand that he did not go to that cross for us to continue to live in sin because when we continue to sin we become the ones driving in each nail, we are the ones raising up that cross and dropping it into that post hole so that the weight of our sins can crush our savior with a sorrow and pain that we can’t even fathom. We are the ones that pierce his heart with a spear each and every time that we choose to sin, because we now know full well that he died in order that those sins could be forgiven in the eyes of God.
So how can we apply what happened to Peter to our lives and learn from his sin of denying Jesus. We are not perfect, and Jesus knew that we would never be, but he asked us to try to be perfect even as his father was. But we must understand the reality of our world in that everyday we are bombarded with choices and aggravations whose sole purpose is to weaken us and get us to sin so that we will be just like Peter was and feel abandoned and not worthy of the one who died to save us. But as flawed and weak as Peter that we are, those mistakes, and moments of weaknes that cause us to stumble and fall to the ground are not the end Because Jesus will never abandon us, they are just one more opportunity for us to prove the enemy wrong by picking up our cross and following him. The sin itself is forgivable only because of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. But only for as long as we continue to learn from our sins and do not let them convince us to abandon him and the cross that redeemed us.
The Tree To The Cross 