[Steve Myers] March Madness is here and the NCAA college basketball tournament is in full swing. Many of us filled out brackets of who we thought would eventually become the championship team. Well, in the very first round, my bracket was busted. I filled out who I thought was going to ultimately be the champion, but right off the bat, my teams that I thought would win were out. Just like that. You’ve probably heard of all the different challenges that are out there – there’s a million dollar challenge, if you got a perfect bracket, you pick every team correct, you could win a million dollars. Well, I would have been out of that instantly. But I did run across another interesting challenge, a whole different way to do your bracket. And what this system allowed you to do is, you could go back and change one of your teams. So if you picked the wrong team, you could go back and re-choose one of your brackets. And so I thought that was kind of an interesting thought, that, okay, I have an opportunity to get it right so that my team might actually succeed, even though I initially picked the wrong one.
I got to thinking about that a little bit, and you know, forgiveness is kind of like that. I do the wrong thing, I’ve made the wrong choice, but you know, God gives us an opportunity to repent, to change, make the right choice, and get on the right path to do things correctly.
I was reminded of a passage that’s in the book of Titus. In Titus 3:8, it says, “This is a faithful saying, and these things I want you to affirm constantly, that those who believe in God should be careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable to men.” Well, I want to have a good and profitable bracket, but I made the wrong choices. More importantly, we need a good, profitable spiritual life. God gives us an opportunity to go back, to repent, to change our thinking, and to do things that are pleasing to him. And so, let’s be on that path. Let’s remember, our life in a way can be like that bracket that can be corrected, so that we go on and do things God’s way. Let’s do that very thing.
