"If a man divorces his wife and she leaves him and marries another man, should he return to her again? Would not the land be completely defiled? But you have lived as a prostitute with many lovers— would you now return to me?” declares the Lord. -- Jeremiah 3:1 (NIV) Double standards don’t make sense. They just never add up. Especially when they are applied to spirituality. Basically it’s saying if you leave your wife and sleep with several others, and your old wife had slept with several others, you would never go back to her because she is dirty. Not because you are dirty, rather she is! And then God says, you have also lived with prostitutes, would you return to me? God accepts the clean and unclean.
A lot of us have this problem of unclean. We feel too dirty, too guilty, or perhaps too proud to ever want to return to God. Sometimes it’s because of guilt sometimes it’s because we didn’t know we needed to (pride sets up large walls that are hard to see over). There really does come a point, however, where even pride doesn’t stop us and we ask with sincerity ‘is there a God and will he take me.’ Depending, however, on how deep that pride is will be answer that question. For some it will be very small and they will know grace, but for others, pride will have created such a wall that they cannot move—not even to accept grace. Sometimes people are so far gone that they don’t even need temptation and satan to make that decision—sometimes pride makes it for them. The point here, however, is we are all unclean. We have all sinned and fallen short of the grace of God. All of us. And though we all have sinned—though we have all sinned and fallen short of God’s grace—we sometimes still feel the urge to make people feel unclean. The urge to say my sin is less than yours. I’m shocked by how many people who have sex outside of marriage say they believe a homosexual having sex outside of marriage is a sinner, but they are somehow okay…nobody’s perfect. There is no sin great in God’s eyes. No person more dirty. No person more clean.
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