Forgiven!

How might you respond if someone asked about your faith and about why you are a Christian? Might you be tempted to launch into a full evangelical explanation - and then realise that they’d lost interest after the first few seconds? Or would you feel a bit uncertain and embarrassed, and wish that you had a leaflet or something that you could simply hand over?

And all the time, you have the nagging thought that they won’t really understand anyway. Our society has moved so far away from spiritual understanding that it all might as well be in a foreign language.

So you need something very short, that they will understand straight away, and that could lead into a meaningful conversation - and here it is!  … “I’ve been forgiven.”

 That’s the essence of the Good News in just one ordinary word - forgiven!

Instead of trying to explain our faith with all those wonderful words that others might find weird or off-putting – words like sin, confession, repentance, atonement – we can talk about something they will easily understand, which is forgiveness! The Holy Spirit will guide us. We can talk about the sheer joy of knowing that however bad we’ve been, we can be forgiven. And how is this possible? Because Jesus has already taken the punishment we deserve.

The only question now is – do we ourselves truly know this? Is our faith based on the wonderful and life-changing truth that we really are forgiven? Because if we have that firm foundation, nothing can stop us!