FBC Daily Devotional – November 22, 2021

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A brief bit of encouragement for your day from God’s Word

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Well, a good Monday morning to you. I hope you had a good weekend, got to the Lord's house, were able to worship together with God's people yesterday, and just getting off to a good start this week.
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Of course, this is Thanksgiving week, so probably depending on your job, your work, if you're not retired, it's a shorter week for you.
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And looking forward to Thanksgiving day on Thursday and that holiday.
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And of course, many people have Friday off as well. Our church tomorrow night, we'll be having a
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Thanksgiving praise service at seven o 'clock. It'll be in the auditorium, should be just an hour long.
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We do some singing of those Thanksgiving hymns and share some testimonies of thanks together and share a few minutes in God's word in a devotional.
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So if you can make it tomorrow evening at seven o 'clock, I'd be glad to have you for that Thanksgiving praise service.
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Well, this being Thanksgiving week, I thought it might be helpful just to start each of the daily devotional times with something to be thankful for and what better place than to go to get some ideas than God's word.
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And specifically Psalm 103. So Psalm 103 begins, bless the
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Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all of his benefits.
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And then there's a list of several things that are benefits that come to God's people from the
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Lord. So I want to look at five of those, take one of them a day, just to mention them and give us something to think about what we have to be thankful for.
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And the first thing that's mentioned in this list is he forgives or he, yeah, he forgives all of your iniquities.
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He forgives all of your iniquities. One of the benefits that you and I as God's people have is that God forgives our iniquities.
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And that of course is consistent with the New Testament teaching in first John one, nine, that if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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So, you know, there are a lot of things we can think about that we can be thankful for, you know, just the daily provisions of life and so on and so forth.
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One of the things, by the way, just as an aside, because it doesn't necessarily come up in this list of things.
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One of the things that I want to encourage us to think about as we meditate on Thanksgiving this week is to be thankful to God for who
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God is. Think of some things about God's character, God's nature for which you can be grateful.
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So in this case, you know, he forgives all your iniquities. Well, what is it about God's nature that he forgives all of our iniquities?
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Well, I think he's a God of compassion. He's a God of mercy. He's a
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God of tenderness. He is a God who is long -suffering. He's a
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God who knows us, knows us full well. He remembers our frame.
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He knows we are dust. So we can be thankful that God forgives all the iniquities of his people.
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And that actually dovetails very nicely with one of the passages that we read for our devotional readings today.
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We were in 1 Kings. We read 1 Kings 9 and 10, but then also read Psalm 130.
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And in Psalm 130, the psalmist cries out to the
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Lord. He says, Out of the depths I have cried to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
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And then this is what he says. It ties in with, he forgives all of our iniquities.
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He says, If you, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?
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Who could stand? And indeed, we are a needy people.
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We are a sinning people. And even though God in his grace has saved you from the penalty of that sin, and even though you don't want to offend him, you don't want to sin and trespass against him, at least hopefully not.
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Sometimes we are confronted with a choice of temptation. And we know
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God doesn't want me to do this, but I want to do it anyway. And in rebellion, we do it. Um, transgression.
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Um, and yet, and yet who could stand if the
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Lord should mark or keep an account of all of our iniquities? Well, then the psalmist goes on to say, but there is forgiveness with you.
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There is forgiveness with you. He forgives all of our iniquities because there is forgiveness with him.
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But now I want you to notice what the next verse says, because here's the thing. Some people can hear,
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Oh, well, God is a God who forgives. He just forgives everything. So then they conclude that I can just go ahead and do what
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I want to do. And, and even though it's wrong. And yeah, I know it's wrong. And I know God doesn't approve of it and all the rest.
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I know that, but, but God's a God of forgiveness and he'll forgive me after all, after all, you know, he forgives all of our iniquities.
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Well, that's not the attitude that should follow the understanding that God is a God of forgiveness.
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Verse four of Psalm 130 tells us what attitude should follow. So the beginning of the verse says, for there is forgiveness with you that you may be feared.
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There is forgiveness with you that you may be feared. Now, on the one hand, that may seem, that may seem, that's a paradox, isn't it?
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Doesn't it seem that since there's forgiveness of, with God, that we shouldn't have to fear?
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I mean, if there wasn't forgiveness with God, wouldn't we be filled with terror? How is, what's the connection here?
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That there is forgiveness with him that he may be feared. Well, it's,
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I think it's wrapped up in the understanding of what that fear is all about. It's not a matter of, you know, that, that looking over the shoulder, looking for the baseball bat to come whacking at your head.
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It's more a matter of, of reverence and respect, that kind of fear.
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So there is forgiveness with him so that the response on our part might be one of reverence and one of respect, which leads us to not want to sin, to not want to have to call upon him for forgiveness.
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We do, we still do, but yet there is forgiveness with him so that he may be feared.
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And I trust that you don't have a cavalier attitude toward, toward sin and toward iniquity.
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Be grateful, yes, be thankful that the Lord our
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God forgives all the iniquities of his people, but he doesn't forgive all of our iniquities so that we can go on and persist in them.
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He forgives those iniquities that we might, in response, fear him, respect him, have a love for him, the kind of love for him that says,
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I don't want to do that again. I don't want to do that again. Yes, I'm coming to you for forgiveness.
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I'm coming to you. I'm crying out to you out of the depths. I'm crying to you to forgive me of my iniquity. And thankfully he does.
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I don't want to commit that iniquity. Why? Because our
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God is such a gracious God, a God of kindness and love and compassion and forgiveness.
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And I don't want to take advantage of that. I don't want to abuse that. I want to live in a way that gives him pleasure, that respects him and reverences him.
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He forgives that he may be feared. Well, I hope that we respond to him, our
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God, with an appropriate fear and respect, reverence.
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All right, let's be thankful. Let's be thankful today that our God is a God who forgives iniquity.
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And so, our Father and our God, we are thankful today. We do thank you that you forgive iniquity.
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You don't hold it against us forever. When we confess our sins, you are faithful and just to forgive us.
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And we thank you for that. And there may be today, even at this very moment, there may be some things that you bring to our mind.
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We need to confess to you and we need to ask you to forgive us of our iniquities.
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Thank you for doing so. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right.