What are some of the core features that comprise the typical video game?
Despite what type of game it is (platformer, adventure, role playing game, etc.), most video games have the same core elements:
- Main characters
- Storyline and plot
- Lives
- Continues
- Game overs
How do you feel when you’re on your last continue, you make a mistake, your character dies, and you get a game over? If you are anything like me, you get frustrated – frustrated with the game, yourself, or possibly both. You spent a lot of time getting to that point, and now you’re either going to have to start back at the beginning of the game (let’s hear it from the old-school gamers in the back!), or your last save point. If you lost any essential items or power ups, you may need to collect those again, and depending on the game, this could take a significant amount of time. Sometimes it is a long, hard journey to get back to where you were! When you get a game over, you go backward before you can continue going forward.
Life Like a Video Game
Isn’t that similar to life? Again, if you’re anything like me, this has happened to you. You made a mistake, wanted to let it go, but didn’t. You kept it in, it kept bothering you, embarrassed you, made you mad, (or insert other negative emotions), and you let it fester and boil inside. This is going backward instead of forward. When you hang on to these types of emotions, it prevents you from living your best life.
This sometimes happens to us in our spiritual lives as well. We sin, either intentionally or unintentionally, and once we realize our actions were against God’s will, we take those feelings about our sin (anger, resentment, etc.) and lock them away. Maybe it’s because we don’t think God is capable of forgiving us because the sin is “too big” to be forgiven. Or maybe we think we are beyond redemption. Whatever the reason, that isn’t the way it works. Let’s take a look at Psalm 103:11-12:
“For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”
God has compassion on his people as sinners. Christ is ready to forgive us of our sins. Whatever it is you have done is what has separated you from God and He is ready to reconcile you back to Himself. He is ready to wipe the slate clean. He is ready to take all of the corrupted files from your hard drive, move them to the trash, and empty the trash so they are no longer recoverable. He is ready to give you more continues with no more game overs. He is ready to renew you.
Unlimited Continues
There is a retro video game arcade near where I live that has no game overs! All of the games are set to free play and there are unlimited continues! You can regenerate and continue playing even if you die hundreds of times!
This is also like our spiritual life! Even though we’ve made mistakes, we’ve sinned, and we’ve separated ourselves from God, it doesn’t have to be the end of the story. We can move forward and find life! However, we need Christ in order to do it. To be renewed, we need to repent of our sins, allow Christ to forgive us, and then move in another direction away from sin.
Sin and Grace
What is important to remember, though, is that we should not intentionally sin in order to receive God’s grace and forgiveness. Paul speaks of this in his letter to the Romans. In Romans 6:1-2, Paul says, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” When we repent of our sin, we move in another direction and strive to continue living without that sin. We can do this because when we repent, we give that sin over to God and it has no more power over us. Dr. James Edwards puts it this way, “Since Christ has broken the claim of sin over our existence, sin no longer determines our existence.”[1] This is freedom in Christ!
Keep Going!
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer discusses this in his classic book The Cost of Discipleship. In it, he distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace: “Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.”[2] God’s grace increases where sin increases. However, what cheapens the grace is when we believe that “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.” The kind of grace the Apostle Paul and Bonhoeffer are referring to is the grace we seek by following Christ and laying down our lives for him.
When we make mistakes in a video game, we can keep going. When we run out of lives, the game over is not final. We will get another chance. When we sin, we can keep going when we turn to Christ and allow God’s grace to cover it.
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Please check out my blog post Justification and the New Birth for more on the topic of forgiveness of sin.
I highly recommend reading Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. His writing is difficult for many, but I encourage you to work through it, perhaps reading it a little at a time or along with others so you can discuss it together.
I encourage you to listen to “East to West” by Casting Crowns. It aligns well with this message and paints a word picture for Jesus’ forgiveness of sin.
[1] James R. Edwards, New International Biblical Commentary: Romans (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 1992), 159.
[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (revised) (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976), 47.
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