Led By the Spirit

This has been such a great day! We have a bible study at work every Wednesday at noon, and today was no different. We have been studying the book of John and today the topic was sin. What is sin? How do different religions define sin? The text was the story of the woman caught in adultery who was brought before Jesus for judgement. He simply knelt down and began writing in the dirt and told her accusers that the one of them without sin should throw the first stone. The obvious message is that we should not judge each other since we are in sin ourselves. The other lesson is that we should always remember that there are always consequences to our sin. We receive forgiveness when we come to God with a truly repentant heart, but we are still morally responsible for the choices we make. Forgiveness does not equal erasure of our sin.

We had a discussion about the differences between the Catholic faith and other denominations and how we deal with sin and forgiveness. It was a very interesting class, but the thing that was so wonderful to me was the conversations sparked later in the day by the subject of sin. I spent the rest of the afternoon talking to my coworkers about the definition of sin, how it relates to our walk in Christ and what the scripture says about a wide range of questions that were brought up. We covered divorce, justification by faith alone, election, predestination, confession in the context of Catholicism, the role of women in the church and a wide range of other topics. It was so great to just talk and share scripture with other people who had questions and issues that are so important to me. It was as though my bible was falling open to all of the right passages and God was putting the right words in my mouth.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you for hearing our prayers and for enabling us through the Holy Spirit to be used for your glory.