With Friends Like These

God forgives sins.

Psalm 103

¹¹ For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.

¹² As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.

But humans remember everything they think we have done.  They judge and attack when the whim suits them.  Once God has forgiven us we should not allow people to hold us bondage to our past sins.  We are free to follow God.  He washed away our sins and prepares us for a great work.

People often try to keep us bound to our sins and sabotage the work we would do for the Lord.  They attempt to make us doubt ourselves.  They refuse to do the work God has laid out and they will try to stop you from following His instructions.

As Patrick found out.

“

And then I was attacked by a goodly number of my elders, who [mentioned] my sins against my arduous episcopate. That day in particular I was mightily upset, and might have fallen here and for ever; but the Lord generously spared me, a convert, and an alien, for his name’s sake, and he came powerfully to my assistance in that state of being trampled down.

I pray God that it shall not be held against them as a sin that I fell truly into disgrace and scandal.

They brought up against me after thirty years an occurrence I had confessed before becoming a deacon.

On account of the anxiety in my sorrowful mind, I laid before my close friend what I had perpetrated on a day– nay, rather in one hour– in my boyhood because I was not yet proof against sin. God knows– I do not– whether I was fifteen years old at the time, and I did not then believe in the living God, nor had I believed, since my infancy; but I remained in death and unbelief until I was severely rebuked, and in truth I was humbled every day by hunger and nakedness.