For those of you who are living the Christian life, you need to make sure you have your worship the right way round. You need to make sure you’re putting Nehemiah 8 before Nehemiah 9, and not the other way around. As we said a couple of weeks ago, the temptation for so many of us is to make fasting, sackcloth, and mourning our default setting, but it shouldn’t be. There is a place for fasting, sackcloth, and mourning over sin, but it comes after rejoicing over forgiveness!
But if you have that undercurrent of joy, clearly established, then there is a place for a meditation on the sinfulness of sin. (Please note what I mean by this word meditation… it’s not meditation as in “empty your mind”, it’s meditation as in “fill your mind”.) It’s meditation as in doing what the cows do with the grass… rumination, chewing it over and over, and then taking it through the four stomachs, chewing it over and over and over. There is a case for chewing over sin, with the aim of seeing how amazing it is that we have been forgiven for it!
