Bible teaching

Church has been amazing lately.

This past Sunday during the message, I was thinking that sometimes I feel as though I'm better acquainted with my own sin than with the One who takes it away. It gets comfortable, or at least familiar, and the idea of turning it over and leaving it seems overwhelming. After the preaching, I was thinking of just taking my lickin' from the service and going to hang out in the nursery or something during Sunday School to think about all that Dr. Cook had said. Sometimes a little anonymity sounds just right, especially when I've been convicted in a certain area.

We went to Sunday School though, and we were so glad we did. Our class is fabulous, and just a place to go be real and learn about the Lord together & encourage and fellowship with one another. This past week, Jason taught on Psalm 51. Oh. My. Word. Schmidts, I wish you were there! The text was a Psalm that David had written right after Nathan had confronted him of his sin with Bathsheba, and it's David calling out for forgiveness. I've read it a trillion times, and love the passion, but never really thought about the word choice. Jason taught us the original language this week. You know how some teachers do that, and it's hard to follow and muddies the point? Wow, this was the opposite of that. David was so incredibly poetic. He asked God to "blot" away his sin. We learned that that particular word means not only to scribble over it (like you would a note that you didn't want to have read), but to dump the entire bottle of ink onto it so that it would never be decipherable again. To "cleanse" means to sanitize--kind of like you would with a dentist's tool. The dentist uses that hook to clean the most disgusting material from one person's mouth, then cleans it and seals it and makes it so pure again that the seal breaks with a whoosh when the packet is opened, and it's as good as new and ready to be used in the master's hand again as though it were brand new. The word for restore means that miraculous thing that happens when you ruin a white tee shirt in the yard, and then you use the stain remover and magically it appears as though it's just out of the pack.

I love the word pictures. I love the Father who loves us so much that He doesn't just convict and leave us there--he restores. I love that we have a small group that we can go to where I don't feel like an idiot if tears fall or the hair stands up on my arms--because God still speaks through His word. We are incredibly blessed.