God does not expect you to be perfect. In fact, he knows your imperfections and failures far better than you yourself do. God can work with failure. He can redeem someone who has fallen deeply into sin. He can redeem those who have lived for themselves and even exploited others. God can redeem the cruellest, proudest, most corrupt, power-hungry monster of a person. God can work with anyone no matter how bad they have become. The hardest to save are not the bad people but the good people, that is, the people who think they are good. Of course, God can do anything but the warnings throughout Scripture, as here in Zephaniah 3, are clear: be careful that you don’t lose a sense of your need for God’s grace. Be careful lest you think you do not need correction. What matters most to God is not how much you have sinned but how responsive you are to his correction. Are you willing to see your sin? That’s the main thing. We often avoid seeing our sin because we feel it may devalue us. It does not. On the contrary, when we recognise our sin, we will see how very much God values us, since it was for this that Jesus gave his life. God paid dearly for you to be redeemed. Now he wants you to want that salvation as much as he wants to give it to you. God is calling you to a place of correction, because this place is also the place of salvation.
Let God show you what you need to see about yourself today, and receive his grace again.
Read Zephaniah 3:1-20
