I am sure we can all remember our schooldays when we were expected to do written exercises and mathematical calculations in our school jotters. We all made mistakes which we had to rub out and correct. If only it was so easy to rub out and correct the mistakes that we make in our lives.

In his letter to the Colossians Paul says, “When you were dead in your sins .... God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins.”(Colossians 2:13) Another translation might be that God has ‘wiped out’ all our sins. They have been erased and our lives can be corrected and made new through faith in Jesus Christ. This lies at the hearts of the Gospel message. Salvation comes through Christ who died to take away our sins. He has paid the debt of sin that we owe to God on the cross of Calvary, when he shed his precious blood that cleanses us from all sin.

Paul could just as easily have said that our sins were ‘crossed out’ using the large Greek letter ‘chi’ which looks like our capital X, which probably explains why we still use an X to mark anything that is incorrect. But somehow that figure of speech was clearly not good enough for Paul’s purpose. Instead he uses a word which means to ‘wipe off’ or erase by using a sponge. In Paul’s time ink was made from a mixture of soot and gum diluted with water. It had no acid in it and so didn’t bite into the paper, which meant that a scribe could quite literally ‘wipe out’ any mistakes he made before the ink had time to dry. So Paul is saying that God has not merely cancelled our sins, but obliterated them. They are both forgiven and forgotten, ‘never to be remembered any more’.

Do you know what it is to be made alive with Christ and have all your sins forgiven? Believe in him today and this will be your experience. All your sins will be wiped out and you will begin again as it were, with a new life and a clean sheet.