Daily Manna · Day 35 · February 4
Redemption
“In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;”
There may be one thing you have never told a living soul. It comes back to you in traffic and in the shower, and you deal with it the way you deal with everything else, by filling the next hour.
The man who wrote today's verse was a prisoner when he wrote it; Paul calls himself "the prisoner" twice in this same letter. He was writing to believers at Ephesus, a city full of magic. Luke tells us what happened there when the gospel took hold. People who "used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men." Somebody added up what those books were worth, and it came to "fifty thousand pieces of silver." These were people whose past had a price tag on it, and they had watched that price go up in smoke in front of their neighbours.
To people like that Paul writes, "In whom we have redemption through his blood." Redemption is a word from the marketplace. It means paying to buy back a slave or a prisoner of war. Paul says the debt was paid, and in the same breath he names what it was paid with. Nothing was simply waved away, as if God were never very bothered by it. Then he adds, "according to the riches of his grace," a grace he says God poured out on us without holding back. That grace is lavish, and it was never cheap.
So the warning here is not about whether God will forgive you. It is about what it costs you to keep carrying something you have never opened to Him, when it was already bought back at that price. Hidden sins do not stay the same size. They arrange a whole life around themselves. The hour you keep filling is never free, either; you are paying for it in a currency you never agreed to spend.
But the verse says "we have." The price is already paid, and the forgiveness is already there for you to receive. Today, tell God the thing you have never said out loud. He already knows it, and the blood of Jesus has already paid for it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 35 is Above a Servant (Philemon 1:16).