Instant answers for an instant society
Sunday 19th May 2024 (Week 69)
Colossians 2: 13-15.
As a child of the fifties and sixties, I can look back joyfully to the days when I enjoyed long bicycle rides into the countryside, fished lazily on the side of a canal, and strolled home whenever the light began to fade. It was all very relaxed, unhurried and time seemed wholly unimportant.
By contrast, we now live in a world where people seem unable to find the time to do all the things they want to and often appear to be running from one task to another. Instant dizziness can be instilled just by listening to some people`s schedules including mine! The result, of course, is the continuous creation of new methods of coping with all this busyness, things that allegedly make our lives easier and provide instant gratification. Television, email, the Internet, home shopping, mobile phones, and TV dinners, arguably all time-saving tools, have served to create expectations of immediacy for a society that’s not prepared to hang around.
With answers to life’s problems being sought at such speed, there seems little time for reflection or God in these busy lives. How, they ask, can God provide such instant answers to life’s problems? A relationship, with God? No time for that!
Life’s greatest problem of course is sin. We see its work in the moral breakdown of society, the collapse of the family, and the rise of the “me” culture where the “If it feels good do it” motto is exercised with increasing regularity. Unfortunately, many don’t even recognise sin for what it is. Even as Christians we do things that can cause us to question our relationship with God. We can get ourselves into situations where we might wonder whether God has really forgiven us because we don’t “feel” forgiven.
The simple fact is that when we seek God’s forgiveness wholeheartedly it is granted immediately. God doesn’t sit in heaven thinking “Should I or shouldn’t I?”, weighing things up on heavenly scales or judging us as the English Law does, on the balance of probabilities. He simply says Yes! God demonstrated his forgiveness 2000 years ago on the cross. When Jesus said, “it is finished!” it was, once and for all – that’s you, me, and everyone who calls on His name.
The next time you need to ask God’s forgiveness try to remember that it’s by the death of Jesus that we are set free, our sins forgiven. He died 2000 years ago and all you have to do is ask. It’s already done. Even modern technology isn’t that quick……and as for TV dinners……..
Prayer: Father, thank you that you have already demonstrated your forgiveness on the cross. Help me to remember that it is already done, once and for all.
Neil Bromage, 19/05/2024