"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezekiel 36:26). "You show that you are a letter from Christ...written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3). Christ has written with sacred blood right across our hard hearts, "Forgiven!" We are "write-protected," to use a computer term. No one else can come along and overwrite that blessed word, "Forgiven." "I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions, for my own sake, and remembers your sins no more" (Isaiah 43:25). O! how grateful we are for this gift! Once absolved, we become living messages and take on the new responsibility of being legible and intelligible. Letters are written to be read and understood. We don't want to misrepresent our Lord by a wavering and unsteady script that sends an inaccurate meaning. A written epistle is permanent; for that reason, we especially want it to be understood. 1) Omissions can change the intention of the writer; the lack of a certain grace which is a mark of a Christian can cause a fateful translation not intended by the writer. 2) Indistinctness, where a word can be misinterpreted, can alter purposes; "How long will [we] waver between two opinions?" (1 Kings 19:21). 3) Worst of all are unsightly blots that stand out so conspicuously as to cause us to be of no effect at all: "Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice" (Ephesians 4:31). Jesus has blotted out our transgressions for His sake and ours; let us not blot out His goodness and mercy to others by misrepresenting Him as His epistles for others! Many great men, especially great thinkers, have perpetuated their influence and have served their race by their writings. As poets, philosophers, or moralists, they have made a place for themselves in the mind of humanity. The greatest of all, the Divine Man, wrote nothing. It is greater to be than to write; and the Lord Jesus simply lived and worked, suffered, died, and conquered. He could not compress and limit his mind within the compass of a treatise or a volume. He left his evangelists and apostles to write of him; his earthly manifestation thus spoke a universal language. Yet, in a sense, he has always been writing, and he is writing now. He is still daily issuing epistles to the world (Anonymous). |
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