TRAIL GUIDE: Paid In Full
The “Trail Guide” devotional is used by our adult leaders of grade school groups in Quest as a way to prepare their hearts and minds for the topics we will be covering with the children on the weekend. We have made them available here to help our parents of grade-schoolers engage with their children around the topics we are discussing and also for anyone else that might be blessed by following along.
SPOTTER, LESSON 3: God is Faithful to Forgive
Propitiation (Greek – hilasmos, meaning an offering to appease an offended party.)
How can a God who hates sin so much just let it go unpunished? When He looks at His creation and sees how scarred and polluted sin has made it, He is greatly offended. How can He not pour out his anger on the guilty? How can God let wrongdoers go free? It doesn’t seem fair. Unless, of course, I am the wrongdoer and then my math changes dramatically, and forgiveness seems a rather wonderful thing. But the questions are still valid. How is it just to leave sin unpunished?
The short answer is, it wouldn’t be just, if that is what God actually did. But sin has been punished. The sins of God’s people going all the way back to Adam accumulated and accumulated. All the while God in his great mercy withheld punishment, looking forward to a day when One would pay for it all and wipe out the debt once and for all for those who believed in his coming. “God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” (Romans 3:25)
The best news is that, not only did Jesus receive the just wages of the sins of all who went before Him, He also made available that credit of righteousness to all who would believe and receive Him in faith in the future. He became our Passover Lamb. The Lamb was slain, that work is done. It is a historical fact that happened completely outside of us and was purely an act of God. The only question that matters now is have you, by faith, applied the blood of the Lamb to the doorposts of your life? Have your students?
“Jesus paid it all
All to Him I owe
Sin had left a crimson stain
He washed it white as snow”
(Elvina Hall, Jesus Paid It All)
“What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” -Robery Lowry, Nothing But the Blood
MEDITATING ON THE WORD:
Romans 3
Psalm 86:5
Ephesians 1:7
Hebrews 10:12, 17