THINK TOGETHER.
Have you ever done something bad and gotten away with it?
READ TOGETHER
Proverbs 11:21. Be assured, an evil person will not go unpunished,
There have been many times in my life that I have done wrong things and gotten away with it. Or at least I think I did. When I was a kid I stole a 10 pack of Juicy Fruit gum. To this day nobody knows that I did that except me (and now everyone reading this).
Solomon is reminding us that even when we get away with things with people, we never get away with things with God. God sees everything and knows everything and, like we learned yesterday, often his punishment is the hurt we cause ourselves when we do bad things. Often God’s punishment is the natural consequences of our bad choices.
There’s another important reminder in this verse though. Sometimes we aren’t the ones doing evil, sometimes evil is done to us. Sometimes it seems like the bullies, and the cheaters, and the bad guys are getting away with hurting us and others. But they’re not. Be assured, God will deal with all sin in his time.
The good news is that whether we are the one doing evil (which we all have), or the ones suffering from evil being done to us (which we will all experience), Jesus died on the cross as the punishment for it all. He was the one person who was not evil, and yet he was punished for our sins. Now, when we trust in his death for us on the cross, we know that we won’t be punished for our evil because we have been declared righteous by God.
Because of Jesus we are declared righteous by God.
With Jesus we can do good not evil.
DO SOMETHING TOGETHER
Read James 5:16 together. Is there anything that you’ve done that needs to be confessed to someone else? Something that you think you’ve gotten away with, but your conscience has been bothering you?
PRAY TOGETHER
Jesus, thank you for taking the punishment for evil upon yourself. Help me to do good today and not bad because I simply trust you. Amen.
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