The World According to Renshi

Close your eyes.  Picture your life as a mountain that you are constantly climbing.  Through the grace of God, you accept Jesus Christ as your savior.  Now you continue your climb and fall.  You pick yourself up and start the climb again… and you fall.  You keep trying and keep falling – and eventually you give up without realizing that when you accepted Jesus as your Savior you were already placed at the top of the mountain.  Your works and failures don’t matter.  What matters is that you accepted Jesus as your Savior in your heart.  God knows we are all sinners. 

In the Old Testament, God’s chosen people were given laws and rules of conduct – straight from God and they still failed – time and time again.  And God continued to stay in covenant with them.  In fact, many people look at the Old Testament as a book of laws designed to make humans fail.  Instead, think of it as story after story of people sinning and going against God and yet time after time He forgives them. 

In Luke 15 and actually throughout Luke, Jesus uses parables to explain that it is more important to minister to one and bring him/her to Jesus than to minister to 100 righteous people.  Isn’t it amazing to think that the feeling you get when saved or baptized is the same feeling Abraham, Moses, David and the apostles had when the same Holy Spirit entered them.  What a humbling thought…