By Pastor Don Schatz

Knowing Right From Wrong

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud Link

There is something wrong with this picture.  You wouldn’t know that unless you live near me and walk the stretch of waterfront I walk.  This is a city park and marine sanctuary.  It is illegal to drive on the beach.  The vehicle drove over a curb, behind a building, and over some driftwood before burying the front wheels in the soft sand.  I don’t know much more than that, but I know that something is ‘wrong with this picture.’

How does one know when there is something wrong with the picture?  Today, you knew once you read my explanation.  I knew because I live here and know the law regarding what is permissible.  Sometimes one may know what is right but do or say the wrong thing anyway.  There can be a myriad reasons for that dissonance.

“There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins.”

Proverbs 7:20. New International Version

About now, you are wondering if you want to read on, aren’t you?  Despite how it starts, this is not a doom-and-gloom missive.  Quite the opposite.  It is always a good idea to start with the truth, and so we have today.  It is always helpful to embrace the attitude of humility that today’s beginning presents.  Do not push back against it.  Trust that there is more to the story.  And there is.

“Love…keeps no record of wrongs” (I Corinthians 13:5. New International Version).  When there is something wrong with the picture of our lives, the power of God’s love does not keep a record against us, but instead moves in the Gospel to correct the picture.  In Genesis 3, there was something very wrong indeed with the picture in Eden.  Still, God came into the Garden.  Still he called Adam and Eve to his side.  There was punishment, certainly.  And there was love.  God’s love.  The woman’s seed in Jesus the Christ fulfilled that Genesis love, setting us right with God.

Is there a relationship of yours where the picture seems wrong?  How can your Christ-begotten-Love make it right?

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado