That Poster Mar-2019 “We all need forgiveness”

7th May 2019 That Poster (Outreach Media)

No matter how interested you are in cricket, it’s Australia’s national game. Indeed, when John Howard was the Prime Minister, he reckoned he had the second most important job in the nation after the Australian cricket captain. If that’s true, then we had a crisis of national leadership last year when our nation’s captain, vice-captain and another player were caught tampering with the ball.

One year later, on 29th March 2019, the most severe bans ever handed down by Cricket Australia for on field behaviour will come to an end. After a year’s forced absence, former captain, Steve Smith, and former vice-captain, David Warner, will once more be eligible to play for Australia and their State teams.

When the ball tampering was discovered the almost universal response from media commentators and the general public was that the punishment needed to be significant. One online poll with over 45,000 responses had 91% saying that Steve Smith should lose the captaincy for good.

All of this shows that most Australians not only don’t believe in winning by any means, but they also do believe in honesty and justice. And they want the consequences of justice applied equally – even if it means losing international competitions because our best players are absent through penalty.

However, if we want justice applied equally to others then we need to be willing to have it applied equally to ourselves as well. And that’s going to be tough. Because if we’re honest we’ll need to admit that we’ve all done things that deserve punishment.

And if we’re brutally honest we’ll acknowledge that the one person we absolutely must talk to about our wrongdoing is God. After all, he’s our maker. And ultimately, we’re going to have to answer to him. In the Bible, God makes it clear that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3:23).

God’s standards are much higher than ours. His standard is perfection. Which means he cannot tolerate evil and won’t allow it into heaven with him.

The good news though is that if we front up to God about our failings, he’s offered an amnesty for the penalty we deserve. Instead of punishing us, God has promised that our penalty and punishment has been dealt with by Jesus’s death on a cross. The Bible puts it this way,

‘For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God’ (1 Peter 3:18).

So, take the amnesty and put your trust in Jesus as your Saviour. Pray to God now and tell him you want what he’s offering.

Ian Brunton