Mark: Journeying With JesusSample

We sense that the world could be, should be, a wonderful place, but the reality repeatedly dashes our hopes.

Mark 2:17

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

In the Bible, “sin” is when we put someone or something else at the center of our lives, instead of our loving Creator. We try to live a single day treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves. We find we can’t do it. All of us instinctively know we ought to treat others in a way we’d want to be treated ourselves. You see, sin is something we keep doing, even when we know it’s wrong, even when we know it’s damaging ourselves and others. Pain, conflict and suffering are part of everyday life.

But sin also damages our relationship with God our Creator and in the end leads to death and judgment. Jesus knows it can be quite uncomfortable hearing his diagnosis. But the God of the Bible isn’t detached or uncaring. He takes our pain and sorrow with such deadly seriousness that he promises to enter into it himself. He’ll undo the death and dysfunction. He’ll open the way for human beings to return, to run back into the arms of the loving God who made them.

Jesus says that if we were to trace all the evil in the world back to its source, the place we’d end up is the human heart.

PRAYER| Heavenly Father, help us to see that Jesus came to rescue us from sin. In this time of reflection, please help me to see my need for forgiveness. Amen.