WHOLLY Innocent

These daily devos are free for you to enjoy!
If you’d like to support the work that goes into them,
please consider donating here.

Another human need that DeNeff points out in this book “More Than Forgiveness” is the need for innocence or purity. Many of us are longing for a fresh start, a clean slate.

Escaping Our Past

The story is told about a young soldier who loses his memory in battle. And when he comes back to his hometown, he doesn't know who the members of his family are. But eventually one family spots him and says, “That's him, that's our son, that's our brother.” And of course, he doesn’t know them.

So they start to take him to the places of his childhood to try and jog his memory. And none of it works. He doesn't remember the school. He doesn't remember his friends. Nothing.

And then a young woman from the neighborhood comes and asks if he remembers doing something to her when she was still young. He denies it, but she describes a birthmark that he bears where no one else can see it. And so he discovers that it's true that he was actually a bad man.

He's about to resign himself to go home to his family when somebody else approaches him - a couple who are childless. In their desperation to have a child, they give him an offer and say, “Come and be our son and forget your past.”

And so he has to decide: do I go back to my old life, which is one of shame, or do I start new? And of course, instantly he decides “I'm going to rather be somebody else. I'm going to start fresh.”

And DeNeff says, “Why does he do this? It's because he only wants to live for the moment. He doesn't want a past. He wants to move on to deny the worst parts of himself and look forward only.” Maybe we can all relate. We look back at our past and we think it would be great to be free of some of the things we've done. And so we confess to God. We pour out ourselves and ask Him to forgive us.

Cleansing

Really, in a sense, we're longing for our innocence to be restored. And DeNeff says this, “The gospel of the Cross is that we can be forgiven and cleansed from our unrighteousness. Sanctification, the cleansing of our sinful nature and the changing of our inclinations, is the confidence that the disease of sin is cured and not merely under control. For where sin abounds, grace abounds more for the one who seeks cleansing. Holiness is the evidence that the cross is as powerful as sin itself. That our fall in the garden has done nothing that our Savior on the cross cannot undo.”

Do you need to come to the Savior today and ask for forgiveness? And more than that, do you need to come to the Savior today and ask for cleansing?

Bring it all to the cross and believe that the Savior forgives you and cleanses you and makes you new. And then walk in this deep faith! Deep faith that God looks at you as cleansed and forgiven. That God has made you new.

You don't need to run away from your past. You can admit it, but saved by grace you can say “That's who I was. But through the grace of God, it's not who I am anymore.”