Happy election day! I live 3,000 miles, and yet I am ready for the ads, the Facebook posts, and the extreme negatively to be over. The toughest thing for me with this election (and to be fair, other elections) is how divisive things are. Even amongst us Christians, we seem so caught up in all sorts of political opinions. This is so much the case that I know families that have been painfully divided, people who have left churches, and friendships that have been obliterated, all because of political viewpoints. What always drives me the craziest about all this division over politics is that, at the beginning and end of the day, there is much more that unites us than divides us. And do you know what one of the biggest things that unites us is? We are ALL sinners and we ALL need God’s forgiveness.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. 1 John 1:5-10.
Let me put this is some very Iowan terms. Let’s think about pigs for a minute (ok, many of you think about pigs EVERY minute, but track with me anyway). As dirty, smelly, and generally obnoxious pigs can be that’s not how they came into the world. Pigs are actually born nice and clean. They become dirty because they live in relatively dirty conditions (at least to us humans), which they soon adapt to and becomes normal to them. To be honest, we are all a lot like pigs! We didn’t come into this world full of sin, but we soon started sinning. All of a sudden we got so used to our sinful world that it really wasn’t a very big deal to sin anymore. All the other pigs, err people, were living in sin, so we might as well too. Guys, we are all sinners, and we all need to be forgiven. My friend Dr. Artie Hall likes to say that Christians are forgiven pigs. We’ve all fallen into sin, and we all need Jesus to wash us clean. This election day, when we are so divided, let’s remember what unites us. We are all sinners, but God loves us all so much as to die for our sins. Despite our differences, let’s all rejoice is the love and mercy of our awesome Christ.
