August 20
*A man’s own folly ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the LORD.*
• Cain. King Saul. King Ahab. All these went the same way. They deliberately rebelled against the LORD and stubbornly refused to follow his ways. They murdered. They lied. They worshiped the idols and pleasures of this world—all to their own spiritual harm. They ignored God’s repeated warnings by means of direct revelation and prophet and Word. By their own voluntary decisions they brought ruin and destruction and judgment upon themselves, but when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse or any lower, one and all refused to acknowledge their sin, refused to repent, and to the bitter end their hearts railed against God, insisting that all that had happened was somehow his fault.
• Sadly you and I see this same series of events playing out in the lives of people we know and love. A husband and father of two young girls refuses to get help for his porn addiction and ends up losing his wife and his kids, his home, and his soul, yet he still maintains it’s all just “adult entertainment.” A coworker feels slighted by your boss. She’s convinced she never gets the credit she deserves, so she starts secretly demanding payoffs from potential clients and embezzling corporate funds. Finally she gets caught. She gets fired. She goes to jail, but she contends that she was totally justified in what she did. She claims that God has had it out for her from day one.
• My friends all these examples recorded in Scripture and seen in everyday life should teach us to take warning so that what happened to them doesn’t also happen to us because it can. Just because we’re believers doesn’t mean that we’re any better than these. We too have a sinful nature that is equally evil and selfish and short-sighted. We need only consider the examples of King David and Bathsheba and the Apostle Peter and his threefold denial of Christ to see that God’s children are not immune to messing things up and ruining our own lives by the choices we make.
• But should we sin and ruin relationships and fail in our responsibilities and disgrace the God we serve, may his powerful grace work something different in us. Instead of raising our fists raging against God and wondering, “How could you let this happen?!” “Why did you make me this way?!” may his Spirit working through his Word and Sacrament bring us to repentance. To confess that what has happened is no one’s fault but our own, that we deserve God’s punishment here and far worse hereafter, and then in faith may he lead us to look to the cross of Jesus, where God released his rage against his sinless Son in our place so that whether our lives are respectable or ruined, we have the assurance that we are nonetheless rescued and forgiven by God in heaven. In his grace and wisdom the Lord may decide to restore us to what we were before, or he may use the consequences of our mistakes and the memory thereof to discipline us and keep us from going down that same road in the future. But in any case let us rejoice when God confronts us with our sin and its consequences and brings us to repent and seek his mercy for therein we have life and hope and peace now and forever.
**Prayer:** Heavenly Father, when I come face to face with my sins today, do not let me ignore them or defend them, but rather break my heart, move my mouth to confess, and my spirit to find your mercy in Jesus, my Savior. In his name I ask this. Amen.