By Doug Redford
Several years ago, someone wrote the following to Dear Abby:
I recently moved to Minneapolis from South Florida, where I had worked as a telephone psychic. The money was great. However, now that I have moved and come to actually know my neighbors, I feel very guilty about my previous line of work. We “psychics” were really just saleswomen. We convinced callers that we knew something about their future. The callers were both men and women, and they really believed what we told them. I feel so bad about the unkind way we treated these people, often laughing behind their backs. Some of them, I know, spent most of their daily wages on those phone calls.
I can’t do anything to make up for my past sins, but please, Abby, warn people of psychic hot lines and what they are really dealing with when they call these lines.
The woman signed the letter, “Pam The Sinner” (capitalizing each word as if to emphasize how terrible she felt).
No matter how badly we’ve sinned, in truth, we all deserve the title: “The Sinner.” The Bible is unashamedly inclusive when it tells us, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). One of the shortest prayers in the Bible is also one of the most earnest. It was spoken by the tax collector in Jesus’ parable: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). But in the original Greek text of this passage, the prayer is more literally, “God have mercy on me, the sinner.”
If we are not certain what to say or pray when we take Communion, the tax collector’s prayer will more than suffice. Each of us could place his or her name in place of Pam’s as The Sinner.
We take these emblems of Communion in grateful recognition that for every “capital S” Sinner there is a “capital S” Savior. Consider The Message’s rendering of Romans 3:23-24:
Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners . . . and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.
Doug Redford has served in the preaching ministry, as an editor of adult Sunday school curriculum, and as a Bible college professor. Now retired, he continues to write and speak as opportunities come.
0 Comments