Luke 5 - Friday 5th January

Today’s chapter is Luke 5

Tom writes:

What did Jesus mean when he said to the paralysed man “Your sins are forgiven”? Surely he can’t mean the man’s paralysis was a punishment from God that would be removed when forgiveness is released? Sadly so many of us secretly think that that is what God is like. The conundrum is unpicked when we realise that we often have far too narrow an understanding of sin, and therefore far too narrow a view of Jesus’ saving work. The modern concept of sin - if it exists at all - suggests you can point at a person and say a specific act was a sin and another specific act wasn’t. It is an individualistic fault-focused idea. But Jesus talks about Sin like a Kingdom. Sin is a manifestation of Satan’s power that holds people in exile from God and corrupts them from the inside out. For Jesus, therefore, forgiveness is to plunder a person out of Satan’s foul influence; to forgive a man is to re-birth him as a member of God’s great community. Jesus’ forgiveness of the paralysed man (and of you) is therefore not about Jesus pretending his evil actions never occurred but it is releasing the man from his sin-defined destiny and commanding him to walk into new life in the community of the redeemed.

The stories about the fishermen and the tax collector are therefore one and the same as the paralysed man. Each of them are delivered from destinies drudging towards death and are reborn into a life defined by the Life of the Messiah. Jesus came to liberate people from the lord of this earth by making him their Lord instead. That is what forgiveness means. If we lifted the bonnet of your view of repentance, what would we find? Would it be a nitpicking, narky moan not to commit acts of sin, or would it be beckoning to rehabilitation and belonging; to movement and to membership. I want the church again to be known for liberating the lost, for inviting distraught and wounded people into the kingdom of kindness where they can find new rhythms and new destinies in intimate obedience to their God. I want to be someone who, like my Lord, gives remarkable, generous invitations to the new life of walking each day in the goodness of our God.

Question for reflection

What would be different if you were filled with all the goodness of God?

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