God's people don't always act like God's people should.

The entire thrust of this season at the end of the church year is designed to bring us face-to-face with reality—reality about sin and death, reality about the human race, reality about God. Something ultimate has entered our world, something or Someone that calls us to attention, calls us out of our daily preoccupations and our routine points of view. That is what this season with its special biblical readings is designed to reveal.

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.

Shame of you. Grace on you.

Shame off you. Grace on you.

Here's the deal, y'all. God. Already. Knows. His people are a hot, sinful mess, so when we simply acknowledge that and repent, He's waiting with open arms. We don't have to justify ourselves because Jesus already did that on the cross. So the risk of repentance doesn't lead to punishment—it leads to the unilateral forgiveness and unconditional affection of our Creator Redeemer. Vegas only wished it had a payout that humongous.

For sure, I would much rather look as if I have it all together and never make mistakes. But as the Bible cautions us, "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."12

The gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent, but it will tell us that we are loved; and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, or asks us to identify with, and make our own, love's comprehensive vision of all we are and have been.

my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

That's why my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

Kierkegaard says: "An ethic which ignores sin is an absolutely idle science.

To sin is human, to lay snares is diabolical.