In the court of social media, you make a mistake, and there is no forgiveness. It’s a shame culture, and no matter what a person does to make things right, it’s too little, too late. It’s just them doing good because “they got caught,” it’s just them doing good because there was a backlash, it’s just them doing good to try to put up the facade that they’re good (but they’re not good). And even if they do the right thing, it’s not because they learned from a mistake, their attempt to do the right thing ends up making the person almost more contemptible than beforehand.

It’s a shame culture and when a person messes up, we don’t like to forgive.

Ironically this shows why the gospel is so beautiful.

Because we have all messed up, we’ve sinned. We’ve sinned intentionally. We’ve sinned in the things we should have done but didn’t. In the things we shouldn’t have done, but did. In the deep recesses of our hearts, we’ve sinned.

Instead of sinning against a bunch of angry bloggers or Facebook readers, we’ve sinned against a Holy and righteous God. And no good deed we do can remove that sin. Forgiveness can never be earned. It must always be given. Otherwise it’s not true forgiveness. Through the gospel, while we cannot do good deeds to take away from our sins, when we trust in Jesus, even though we couldn’t earn it, even though we don’t deserve it, God forgives us anyway.