Busted!

Have you ever tried to do anything you weren’t supposed to do and even trying to be very discreet, get caught anyway? I’m thinking of the time my daddy had gotten a new car and it had something in it that was extremely interesting to a four year-old, a cigarette lighter! Of course neither of them smoked so it wasn’t used but I was very curious as to what it did, so with orders to never touch it going in one ear and out the other I caught my parents not looking and pushed it in, when I pulled it out it was glowing red-hot and for some un-known reason I decided to smell it and promptly burned the whole end of my nose! I went into the house with my nose was burning so badly that I wanted to cry and there was no way to hide it from my mother’s eagle eye, I was busted!

Adam and Eve got caught big time when God came for his evening walk with them and found them cowering behind a bush, ashamed of their nakedness! (Genesis 3) When we read of Cain and Able (Genesis 4:7-10) I imagine that Cain felt busted when God asked him where his brother was, knowing that he had murdered him!

Joshua 7:1-26 is the story of Achan who took garments and a wedge of gold after they were directly told not to do so! He really was busted when his whole family was thrown into a pit and stoned because of his actions! Samson, who was the Judge over Israel for twenty years, must have felt like a dope when Delilah duped him because he was sinning against everything he had been taught.

Isaiah 59:12 For our sins are piled up before God and testify against us.

Today something happened that brought this subject to my attention. A young person had put some disparaging remarks on a picture of a person on Facebook, thinking he wouldn’t get caught, but someone saw it that told his mom and, you guessed it, he was busted and is now completely restricted from the site! He said he didn’t mean any harm, just trying to be funny, it wasn’t! How many times we as adults do things that are just not right and get busted for gossiping about someone when the wrong person overhears! We all know the feeling of knowing you have been wrong about something and being very sorry, not sorry you did wrong, just sorry you got caught!

Numbers 32:23, “and you may be sure that your sin will find you out.” I can’t tell you the number of times my mother quoted that scripture to me in my growing up years, and here I am quoting it to YOU!

Well there is GOOD news coming up, Romans 5:20-21; All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn’t, and doesn’t, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it’s sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that’s the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

Did you read that? Read it again, OK, don’t you feel better now?

I know there are people who teach “sloppy grace”, which is that anything goes and you just get by with it which is not true if you forsake Jesus as the only Savior, or offend the Holy Spirit! I don’t think any of you Readers are guilty of that, but if you are feeling “busted” just know that Jesus died to cover you and the Word also says, 1 Peter 4:8, And above all things have fervent love for one another, for “love will cover a multitude of sins.”

When we get busted in an act of wrong doing, Jesus stands at the Throne and reminds God that he died for us to cover our sins so instead of being busted, you are forgiven!