Seven Pounds and Redemption

So, by random chance, I got to go to the movies this weekend – thank you, Grandmaw and Papaw Harper for this opportunity to spend time with my lovely hubby. We went to see Seven Pounds, which just opened up this weekend.

Anyhow, these are my thoughts on the movie. Without telling you much about the movie, it is supposed to be sorta shocking and surprising, but I have to say that it was all very predictable and basically a story that could be told in a couple of minutes, instead of 2 hours, so the movie producers had to get creative in telling the story so that it would take 2 hours. The viewer is supposedly involved in a mystery and pieces of the story are given all along the way. I was not impressed with Will Smith’s acting – he made this horrible, “life is awful” face the entire movie and that was his acting.

But to get to the main point I want to make, there is a sense of redemption in the movie. I always like to see redemption and God hidden in movies, but the redemption in this movie was not from God, it was man made, and what kind of redemption comes from man? Only true redemption can come from God, so in this sense the movie was sad. Men and women in the movie were judged by the main character’s (Ben Thomas) measuring stick of who were good and who were bad. And yet, God’s word says that “All have fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) and that there is “no one who does good, no, not one” (Romans 3:10).

Several things came to my mind as I pondered. Just yesterday, I sinned. I misused my tongue. I spoke about a haircut I didn’t like in a way that caused defamation to the hairdresser. Now, those who know me best, know that the infraction may have been minor, but as I was convicted by the Holy Spirit, I realized it was no minor matter. Thinking some more, I realized that if I was under Ben Thomas’s judgment in the movie, he would have passed me over for someone who could be more good than I was in that one circumstance, but we know that one cannot be judged on one circumstance alone – no, we all sin sometime someway everyday!

The second thought I had was a reinforcement of how careful a Christian must be to live out life transparently and genuinely. When I sin, unlike the characters in the movie, I am covered by the redemption God has given me through Jesus because I have accepted Him as my Savior. Even though I sin, I am good all the time to God because He remembers my sins no more, but not so to the Ben Thomas’s who are watching me in the world out there. That means I must be very careful when I do sin – to confess my sin to the onlooker and ask forgiveness. Confession of sin separates us from being a hypocrite and helps us rely on God’s power and not my own. I am so glad that there is a hope greater and beyond myself, because I could never do it alone.

I know that most of us pass judgment a lot of times on people around us – good or bad.  We mentally categorize people. You often hear in introductions, “This is so and so. He/she is a very good man/woman.” There are some who think of me as good, and some who think of me as not good or bad. I like to work to be considered a good person. My efforts are in vain because all of us go in the bad category! When I think of this, I find freedom knowing that I do not have to please man, but God alone. His Spirit will tell me when I stray from His plan, and He has already forgiven my short comings!! Praise God for God and His great Mercy! If and when I get down for feeling like a failure, I don’t have to feel that way because God is perfecting me even when I do fail. Only when I work in my strength will I find hopelessness – in God’s strength, there is hope.