It’s A Hard-Knock Life

eDevotion

Encouragement for your daily walk with God

I was watching a promotional piece for Annie, the new Sony Pictures movie to be released in mid December. It was a very entertaining scene in which Annie and the orphans danced around the orphanage singing, “It’s a hard knock life for us…” [words and music by Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin].

I enjoyed watching the kids singing and dancing, but then something struck me: life is hard in this old world of sin. And the truth of the matter is that we humans have been trying to fix it for thousands and thousands of years. We can’t fix it because WE are the problem! From the moment that Adam and Eve went their own way, it’s been a hard knock life [my loose translation of Romans 5:12 - When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. NLT].

Before we point the finger of death at Adam and Eve, let’s do a little truth telling. They weren’t the only ones who made the choice to sin. I made it; you made it; everyone—we’ve ALL made that choice. Paul put it this way, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God [Romans 3:23].

That is one of the reasons life is so hard. Sin has infected our marriages, our health, our finances, our thinking, et al. When we understand that, we are no longer surprised by the hard knock life. We now understand that our sin against God has managed to break everything. 

The answer to this dilemma is not to try to fixed every broken thing, but to repair our relationship with God, through Christ. Paul wrote, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” [Romans 5:1]. Once our peace with God is re-established, we can begin to honestly deal with the broken issues of life.

All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own.” [Isaiah 53:6 New Living Translation]