“Knowing Christ is the best thing that has ever happened to me, although winning the US Open was a pretty good second.”
Free from sin
He appeared so that he might take away our sins 1 John 3:5John has a lovely way of expressing an encouraging truth to bless us and then adding a sting in the tail – “so what are you going to do about it”.
We are all sinful people. Sin sounds such an old-fashioned religious word. Remember the Greek word for sin is Hamartia, literally to miss the target (to shoot and miss the hoop, to overstep the line, to serve a double fault, to false start etc). Sin is to miss the target in a moral sense, to fall short of the standard. We are done sinned – that is the bad news. The good news is that Jesus has come to take away sin – to take away out guilt and punishment and to set us free. In the next verse he writes that we live in Christ. What an amazing thought!
Then John continues: “No one who lives in Him keeps on sinning”. John challenges us to live in a way that pleases God. He challenges us not to keep in sinning. All of us have areas in our lives where we are weak and have a tendency to keep failing. John challenges us to do something about it. With God’s help