“But instead, those sacrifices actually reminded them of their sins year after year…And when sins have been forgiven, there is no need to offer any more sacrifices.” Hebrews 10:3,18 (NLT)

(This second week of devotionals from the book of Hebrews was originally published in March 2021 and aligned with the sermon series “Jesus, the Radiance of God’s Glory.”)

I love a good list: daily, weekly, and monthly to-do lists, grocery lists, wish lists, prayer lists, chore lists for the kids...and the list goes on! These are all lists I or anyone else can physically write down, but there are other lists we store in our heads and hearts. We keep lists of hurts, words, and actions we wish we could take back, people who have wronged us. It’s all sin, whether it belongs to others or ourselves.

Pre-Jesus, the folks of the Old Testament were required to offer animal sacrifices to atone for their sins. This annual ritual was overseen by a high priest. Can you imagine the weight of an entire year’s worth of sins being listed and then dealt with all at once? “Yep, I had that big fight with my brother around the first of the year, I said that hurtful thing to my spouse all those times, then there was that incident with the neighbors about their barking dog, and I snapped at the kids a lot...” And the list goes on!

The animal sacrifices were never going to be enough, so Jesus offered himself as the once-for-all sacrifice for all sins. Jesus’ death and resurrection abolished the old way of blood sacrifices and replaced it with a new covenant, a new promise that everyone who believes is forgiven. 

An ill-advised Sunday school teacher once told my class that we must ask forgiveness for each and every sin we had committed that day before we fell asleep at night, or we ran the risk of dying in our sleep and waking up in hell. (Hello, childhood anxiety!) That’s not how it works when we trust Jesus with our hearts and lives: His sacrifice on our behalf means every sin is forgiven! That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask for forgiveness when we do wrong or try to make things right when we know we’ve made mistakes, but we who are covered in Jesus’ blood are forever cleansed in God’s eyes. He keeps no record of our wrongs.

No more lists. No more reliving a year’s worth of sins all at once. Jesus wiped our slates clean and erased our list of sins once and for all.

Is there a person in your life who has made a habit of bringing up your past mistakes? Take a minute and pray for that person today.

Are YOU that person in someone else’s life--who continually brings up past wrongs? Pray that God will help you to forgive as you have been forgiven.

The lists we keep can end up weighing us down with guilt over past sins. They become balls and chains that we need not drag behind us, so let’s take a moment and leave them with Jesus today.