God required no one to exist before Him. He existed before this world. He existed before the angels. He existed before there was any material things at all. There was no time before God. In fact, that is true in two senses because God even existed before time.

I am the Alpha and the Omega,  says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. Rev 4:8
The eternity of God points us to His self-existence.
“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever You had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting You are God” (Psalm 90:2).
There was a time before Tom. People existed before I did. And if they didn’t then I wouldn’t exist because it was people who caused my existence. My parents had to exist for me to exist.
God required no one to exist before Him. He existed before this world. He existed before the angels. He existed before there was any material things at all. There was no time before God. In fact, that is true in two senses because God even existed before time.
God has existed forever because He is self-existent.
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If Jesus frees you, you will be free of your sin. You will be free of your guilt. You will be free of the punishment you deserve for all your rebellion against God. You will be free to pursue what is good. You will even be free to be full of joy and thankfulness even at a time like this.

Do you want freedom? Do you feel like the government has crossed a line? Do you feel restricted, perhaps even enslaved? Do you feel forced to do things that you wish you didn’t have to do?
Do you long to be free?
We typically think of freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to do.

Perhaps our concept of freedom is wrong.
In the past, freedom was defined as the ability to pursue what is good.
We don’t want people to be free to murder each other. We don’t want business owners to be free to lie about their products. We don’t want absolute, unbridled, unrestrained freedom. We want freedom that is directed towards good.
We want the freedom to earn a living for our family. That’s a good thing.
We want the freedom to serve all sorts of people at our shops without having to turn away the unvaccinated. That’s a good thing.
We want doctors to have the freedom to advise their patients on the best medical decision for them. That’s a good thing.
But there’s a problem.
Are any of us truly free?

We might feel like the government is enslaving us at the moment – and that is true in many regards. But the truth is that we are all by nature slaves of a worse master than the government. Jesus put it this way: “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34).

Jesus is telling us that by nature none of us is truly free. We all sin and, therefore, we are all slaves to sin. None of us is able to pursue and do what is good.
We are restrained in our sin by the consequences or by the shame of what other people might think but if we were all left without restraint – in total, unbridled freedom – we would find that we sink into dreadful sin.
Richard Wurmbrand lived in communist-era Russia. He was a Christian pastor who was imprisoned for his faith.

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As we are going through this disaster of a time – make time to mourn over your sin. Stop and contemplate its horror. Meditate on how filthy our hearts are. Look your sins straight in the face and weep over them. Consider fasting to help you focus on your sinfulness. Pray that God would cause you to see the blackness of sin. Joel teaches us that when disaster like this comes upon us, we ought to mourn over our sin (Joel 2:12-13).

This current crisis should drive Christians and the church to mourn and repent. We should see one of our duties at the moment as mourning over our sin. In both Testaments this was often accompanied by weeping, wailing, grief, lament, fasting, putting ashes put on one’s head or a humbled posture and the wearing of sackcloth – a very itchy and course material.
Someone who mourns his sin is humble before God and fasts or wears sackcloth not in order to pay for sin like some sort of penance, but because it demonstrates that he knows he does not deserve God’s blessings.
When we experience a disaster, such as the current one, we should be prompted to consider the depth of our sin and to mourn over it. To help us to that end, here are seven reasons why should we mourn over sin. Some of these reasons were inspired by Thomas Watson’s excellent little book on The Doctrine of Repentance.
1. Our sin is worse than our afflictions.
The cause is worse than the effect. All of our afflictions come because of our sinfulness. If we think people dying of a disease is bad, we need to realise that sin is worse. All suffering should point us to the fact that sin is a terrible evil because it is because of sin that we live in this cursed world.
2. Our sin finds its origin in the Devil.
Those who revel in sin are children of Satan. 1 John 3:8 says “He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning.”
3. Our sin is an offense to God.
The Bible describes sin as dishonouring God (Rom 2:23), despising God (1 Sam 2:30), and cheating on God like a wife cheating on her husband (Ezek 6:9).
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