Your Salvation Is Secure

“Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.” —Church marquee

“Forbidden fruit creates many jams.” —Church marquee

Hundreds of years ago, one of the great church fathers, Martin Luther, patterned his whole day around ensuring that he didn’t sin. He was terrified that if he sinned, he would lose his salvation. Every evening he’d wrack his brain, trying to remember if he did something, said something, or thought something sinful.

Have you ever done that? It’s pretty miserable just to think about, isn’t it? If you believe that by sinning you can lose your salvation, tons of questions come up. How many sins do you have to commit to get booted out of the family? Or is it qualitative? Is there a “badness scale” of sin on which we can rate ourselves? Where is murder? Rape? Suicide? Adultery? Child abuse? Lust? Stealing? What about laziness or procrastination? How do we know if something is really a sin or not?

Playing in the Mud

Written by Kristi Huseby

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“And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of His face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like Him.” (2 Corinthians 3:17-18, The Message)

What is it about boys and mud? It attracts them like bees to honey! If there was any mud to be found in our back yard, my four boys would find it. They would never carefully step around a mud puddle. Oh no, they would stomp right into the middle of it! I can’t tell you how many times I would go out to the backyard and find them playing in a mud puddle and rubbing mud all over each other. They would often try to clean themselves before I found them but that only made matters worse. The only way to get them clean was to spray them down with a hose and get them into the bathtub for a good soak.