August 12 – Committing Sin and Lawlessness

Hope for Today: A Daily Devotion from Reasons for Hope*Jesus

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“Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness. And you know that He was manifested to take away our sins.” 1 John 3:4-5

There is more power in the blood of Christ to save and cleanse than in sin to defile and destroy. Hence it may be called “precious blood.” When applied to the heart by faith, it diffuses peace, excites love, and endears the authority of Him from whose side it flowed. Yet these effects are accomplished in the very best of mortals, in part only. It, therefore, becomes us all to be earnest at the throne of grace, that we may be kept by Almighty power, and that Jesus may be for us, who is stronger than all that can come against us; and that He may so manifest Himself to us in love and in power, that we may enjoy an assured sense of pardon and peace; and not only so — but that our hearts may be set against sin and our lives be free from the open commission of sin.

May we delight in the law of God after the inward man, as Paul did; and walk by the law, which only requires supreme love to God and equal love to men.

O to love God as God deserves to be loved and to love men as God wishes us to love them!

Enslaved by sin and bound in chains,
Beneath its dreadful tyrant sway,
And doom’d to everlasting pains,
We wretched, guilty captives lay.

Jesus the sacrifice became,
To rescue guilty souls from hell;
The spotless, bleeding, dying Lamb,
Beneath avenging justice fell.

Devotion by Karl Heinrich von Bogatzky (1690—1774)