TOWARDS SIN
(PS: If you don’t like the concept of sin, this blog is not going to add to your comfort. Remember I am a doctor of medicine and rejoice in clarifying just what is wrong so something can be done about it. Even so as a doctor of the heart I love to clarify what is wrong with me so God can scrape out the wound and bring healing and prevent further damage.
GOD’S HEART:
Genesis 6:6 And it REPENTED the Lord that he had made man on the earth,
and it grieved him at his HEART. Ephesians 4:30 and grieve not the Holy
Spirit of God.
Like any good leader, God never asks me to do what he has not already modeled for me. He simply ask me to be like him, to be as perfect as he is perfect. (Even if I know that the word “perfect” means mature, being as mature as God is mature–still impossible, right?) This entails getting out of his way moment by moment and letting him live his life through my yielded body members, in this case letting his heart take over my heart, my inner thoughts and chatter. When my inner chatter is his inner chatter then it is truly not I who live but Christ who liveth in me.
As the late Billy Graham’s prayed for our nation: We need to grieve over the sins of man and not water them down.”we call the lottery hope for the poor and help for worthy causes instead of what it is: exploitation of the poor! We call endless nonresponsible welfare which confirms the poor in perpetual poverty: help and kindness! We call murder of innocents: choice! We abuse power and call it politics! We covet our neighbor’s wife and house and job and call it: ambition! We fill the electronic world with profanity and pornography and murder and just plain consumption of valuable life time and call it: freedom of expression! We ridicule the time honored and Bible based traditions of previous generations and call it: progress and enlightenment!
Even if we may not call evil–good, we may just resign ourselves to ignoring it. Out of wedlock children are devastating the inner city church and society but it is so common that the preachers see it as just a way of life and do not attack it for fear of offending all those involved. Suburban fundamentalist Bible preaching pastors, dare not preach against divorce and remarriage or they would have no one to minister to. The Lord advised us to use our eyes to see what he sees. As I sit in my office and see the results of family disintegration, of having no time for being still, of being depressed or filled with envy through comparing with what we see on Facebook, of exhaustion from striving to live up to what others have and do etc. I have no trouble hating sin and hungering for righteousness but sometimes I feel numbed out. How to hate sin and not be overwhelmed? Well in part, I limit myself to what I can do and to what God wants me to do. To pray fervently, help when I can and share words from God’s wisdom and feelings from his feelings.
We need to hate evil with great passion and love on the people who do the evil with equal passion. We Christians need to pray for those who despitefully use us and bless those who curse us and do good to those who do bad to us. My daughter, Cheri hates what capitulation to evolution has done to the Church and our country but she is upset with how other Christians attack the enemy rather that pray for them. Psalms 101:3 I will hate the work of them that turn aside. Psalms 109:104 I hate every false way because it prevents understanding truth.
If we don’t hate evil, but still call it evil, we will first become numb, then curious, and then wind up doing the evil–just not as “evily” as the world, while murmuring, “I thank God that I’m not that bad.” Romans 7:15 But what I hate, that I do. Finally we will wind up calling good bad and bad good. We should especially hate and be grieved by our own sin. Happy is he who condemneth not himself in the thing which he alloweth Romans 14:22
Numbers 25:1-12 Phinehas hates fornication and does something to stop it. Psalms 97:10 Ye that love the Lord–hate evil. Proverbs 8:13 The fear of the Lord is to hate evil Amos 5:13 Hate the evil, love the good and establish judgement
OH GOD help me hate sin as you hate sin. May I call a spade a spade and see sin for all that it is. Help me be burdened for those trapped in sin, but also see you for all you are and let you attack the evil through me.
verlebellmd.com 