Tag Archives: sin

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I have just a short list this week of good reads found online:

What Questions Do You Have About Your Faith? HT to Challies. “It can be uncomfortable to wrestle with hard-to-answer questions, can’t it? A child is still figuring life out, so that seems more palatable. But what about us as adults? How do we perceive asking questions about what we believe? Is it a lack of faith when we put words to our confusion about what God is doing in our lives? Is there value in voicing our questions?”

Even the Darkness, HT to Challies. “It doesn’t matter how you find your way into darkness. You may be suffering with chronic pain. You may have succumbed to the same sin over and over and now realize you’ve backed yourself into a dark corner with no conceivable way out. You may just be under a heavy cloud of despair, unsure where it’s come from. Whatever it is, wherever it’s come from, you can take courage that God sees your situation from a different perspective.”

Which Sins Are Feeding Your Sin of Lust, HT to Challies. The sin we’re most discouraged about may have others that contributed to it.

Thinking Sensibly About Ourselves, HT to Challies. “When walking the narrow road of the Christian life, many of us fall into one of two traps when it comes to our gifts: viewing ourselves too highly or too lowly. Some of us have permanently taken up residence in one of these ditches and refuse to move.”

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Here are some good reads I’ve discovered recently:

Why Study the Old Testament? “Since the NT speaks directly to believers today and since the OT speaks directly to Jewish people many years ago, is the OT now irrelevant and obsolete? The answer to this question is a resounding ‘no.’ But why?”

How Cancer Healed My Dad, HT to Challies. “He endured months of aggressive treatment that made him feel horrendous, only to be told after each scan that he hadn’t responded to it and the cancer had spread further. He developed infections and bowel obstructions which hospitalised him at times, and when he was at home he spent most of his days on the sofa. But curiously, he described it all as the best year of his life.”

Can We Finally Break the Silence Around Tamar? “When we tell Tamar’s story aloud, we dignify her grief. And we begin to become for our sisters the advocates Tamar should have had.”

How an Internet Mob Falsely Painted a Chipotle Employee as Racist, HT to Challies. This kind of thing has to stop. People shouldn’t automatically believe what they see on the Internet and then pass it on without confirming it.

You Never Know, HT to Maree. Speaking of misjudgment – this is one mom’s scenario of what was going on behind a situation where she could easily have been misjudged.

Karen Swallow Prior, author of Fierce Convictions about Hannah Moore, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (both linked to my reviews), and On Reading Well (on my To be Read stack) was hit by a bus a little over a year ago. She has shared some enlightening reflections on the accident and her recovery in a couple of places:

The Role of the Body in Healing After Trauma. This was especially helpful to me, as some of her experiences paralleled mine after Transverse Myelitis. Though TM was traumatic in itself at the time, I hadn’t considered that I needed to recover from the trauma as well as the illness.

Sin is Like Getting Hit By a Bus.

Laudable Linkage

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Here’s my latest round-up of thought-provoking online reads:

Danger: Doing “Jesusy” Stuff Without Knowing Jesus, HT to True Woman.

7 Things You Should Know About the Formation of the New Testament, HT to Out of the Ordinary.

Russian Spies, Post-millennialism, and the National Prayer Breakfast.

The Morning Before a Sexual Fall: How the Battle for Purity Is Lost. Though the context is sexual sin, the principles apply to any temptation.

Smells Like Teen Spirit, HT to Challies. “For many, ‘going to church’ is less about worshiping the infinitely holy God who was redeemed a people for Himself by giving up His Son to the bloody death on the cross, as it is about getting a shot of motivational vitamin-B for existential significance. Rather than being called by God into His presence by the mediating work of His Son, “Here we are now; entertain us” becomes the liturgical responsive call to worship. After all, the success of the church is dependent on your excitement, isn’t it?”

6 Warning Signs Of A Bad Pastor And Spiritual Abuse, HT to Challies.

Learn to Embrace Mess, HT to Challies. I didn’t think I was going to agree with this, based on the title, but it does make sense in context.

Confusing Christ-likeness with Christ: Seeking the soft-hearted in the search for a spouse, HT to True Woman.

No, Kids, You Can’t Be Anything You Want to Be.

9 Things Adult Daughters Want Their Moms to Know.

Shouldn’t We Share Our Concerns About a Book Directly with the Author Instead of in the Public Forum? HT to Challies.

How Many Cups in a Quart? A free printable chart.

Fake Views: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Soviet Photoshopping – before Photoshop was invented. HT to Challies.

And finally, a couple of thoughts for the day found on Pinterest:

Happy Saturday!

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Here are several thought-provoking reads found in the last week or so.

Every Testimony Is Dramatic and Miraculous. “There is nothing basic or boring about the life-transforming power of our Lord Jesus Christ. The angels throw a party every time someone comes to Christ, and the parties aren’t less enthusiastic for the freckle-faced eight year olds. Salvation is never small. It is big and dramatic and miraculous, every single time.”

Is Prayer Enough?

What Jesus Said About White Privilege.

7 Stabilizing Principles in a Chaotic World, Part 3: Everyone Is Made in the Image of God. Even the people on the other side of the political fence or the ones who drive us crazy. And we “need to treat everybody—everybody—with that kind of respect.”

How You Might Break the Third Commandment in Church, HT to Challies.

What to Do When a Friend Loses a Baby, HT to True Woman. Much of this is good for other types of loss as well.

Give Children All of Your Attention. Some of the Time. HT to True Woman. I remember  as a young mom struggling with guilt when I did not give my children my full attention, yet feeling it was good for them to learn to entertain themselves sometimes. I thought of women in Bible times or even a couple of hundred years ago who had to do so much from scratch and could not have possibly sat on the floor playing with their children eight hours a day. But it is good to set everything aside for one-on-one time together sometimes. This post has some good thoughts along these lines.

How to Leave Porn Behind, HT to True Woman. Good thoughts on “radical repentance” for any sin.

3 Reasons Contemporary Worship Is Declining, and What We Can Do to Help the Church Move On. I don’t agree with every point here, but I especially like this: “We’ve done ourselves and the church a disservice by insisting that there are two kinds of worshipers, traditional and contemporary…Our musical tastes don’t dictate how we worship, our theology does. Both of these extremes are toxic. All worship is historic because it recalls the creative and redemptive acts of God. All worship is contemporary, because we’re doing it now. All worship is future, because it foretells the coming resurrection.”

And, finally, a smile found on Pinterest. This is close to how I really think now, except I say 20. 🙂

Happy Saturday!

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I’ve rounded up some thought-provoking reading from the last couple of weeks:

Help Me to See Sin as You See It.

What Does It Mean to Find My Hope in Christ? HT to The Story Warren.

7 Mistakes We Make in Women’s Bible Study.

A Stranger’s Gift.

What I Learned About Marriage by Losing My Husband.

Three Steps to Better Doctrinal Disagreements, HT to Challies.

I Was a Disney Princess, I Had an Abortion, and It Almost Ruined My Life, HT to Challies.

Racial Reconciliation: What We (Mostly, Almost) All Agree On, and What We (Likely) Still Don’t Agree On, HT to Challies. Kevin DeYoung did a good job here of laying out the complexity of the issues. This is why one-sided, simplistic suggestions for solutions are not helpful.

Discernment muscles. This is so important to teach our children.

6 Graces…For When We Are Our Own Harshest Taskmasters.

4 Ways to Take Your Time Management to the Next Level. “Balancing the tyranny of tasks and the tenderness of meaningful relationships continues to be my walk on the razor’s edge. The prudent use of little minutes requires a few good practices that become habits over time.”

The Theology and True-Life Tragedy behind Hallmark’s Hit Show, “When Calls the Heart”, HT to Challies. I have not seen this show, but years ago I read the series on which they were based, written by Janette Oke. She began my love for Christian fiction. “If you give your life to Jesus, Oke believed, you can know how much he loves you, and his love can comfort when life is hard. This is the theology Oke put in her romance novels…It was Augustinianism in a bonnet, in a made-up prairie patois. It was evangelicalism for the everyday lives of women who knew how life could be. It was a story for all those who are weary and burdened, who just wanted to give the weight of their lives over to Jesus.”

How to Save Your Privacy From the Internet’s Clutches, HT to Challies. Scary! And I admit I don’t understand a great deal of what’s discussed here.

And lastly, most of us are able to identify with this, especially this year! (Seen on Facebook – don’t know the original source.)

Happy Saturday!

(Links do not imply 100% endorsement.)

My Sin Is Not Someone Else’s Fault

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When I have to confess something to the Lord or apologize to someone else, I tend to want to explain the reasons I did what I did, as if that somehow justifies my wrong response.

The very first people committing the very first sin did the same thing.

One day I was totally arrested by this thought:

My sin is not someone else’s fault.

Wait – aren’t they responsible for what they did? Don’t other people sometimes deliberately try to get us to sin?

Sure. And they’re answerable for their own actions.

But what does God tell His children?

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. (1 Corinthians 10:13, ESV)

When we give account of ourselves to God, we won’t be able to point the finger at anyone else.

I used to take refuge in the King James version of 1 Corinthians 13:5, especially in that word easily in the phrase “love…is not easily provoked.” And then a trusted pastor told us that the word “easily” isn’t in the original text. If you look up the Strong’s numbers for this verse, which link to the Greek or Hebrew words and their translations – there is no link for “easily.” Many other translations leave it out.

So I can’t use that as an excuse: “I tried to resist, you know, and did for a while, but really, it was just too much. Anyone would have reacted that way at that point.”

No, God has promised “a way of escape” in each temptation. Too often I am looking for a reason to give in rather than a way to get out of temptation.

We all fall and fail every day. What are we to do?

1. Accept responsibility. Acknowledge what we did wrong and own up to it. (And if I can interject this here, we also need to teach our children to do this. Yes, we understand that they act out when they’re tired, hungry, etc., and we attend to those issues first. But when they do something deliberately wrong, we need to avoid making excuses for them and teach them to own up to what they did.)

2. Confess it to the Lord.

If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9

Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.  Proverbs 28:13, ESV

I’ve been told that to “confess” means “to say the same thing as.” In other words, call it what the Bible says it is. I didn’t tell a little fib: I lied. I wasn’t just a little out of sorts: I was selfish and irritable and unkind.

3. Rest in His promise of forgiveness.

4. Confess it to anyone else involved. A trusted former pastor once said that the circle of confession needs to be as wide as the circle of the sin. If I spoke harshly to someone in private, I need to go back to that person, apologize, and ask their forgiveness. If someone embezzles funds, well, that’s a much wider circle.

5. Make restitution if necessary. If something was stolen or property was destroyed or damaged, we’re responsible to to return, replace, or pay for it. If someone’s reputation was damaged, we do what we can to acknowledge our own blame and clear the other person.

6. Mortify (kill) the sin. I admit this is a concept I struggle with, because if you “kill” something, then you don’t expect to have trouble with it the very next day – or hour. But Romans 8:13 says, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” (ESV; the KJV uses the word “mortify”). A helpful explanation is here, but an idea that helps me don’t give it life support. Do all you can to undermine it, to weaken it, rather than to give it any impetus. “But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans 13;14, ESV).

7. Seek victory. Pray and seek God’s Word for His help in overcoming sin. Perhaps memorize applicable Scriptures or copy them and put them on a card in a prominent place as a reminder.

8. Plan ahead when possible. The young man in Proverbs 7 who got taken in by  the wrong kind of woman was where he should not have been in in the first place (v. 7-9). We might need to avoid certain places. If we’re going into a situation where there might be trouble, we can make a plan of action: for instance, if I have a tendency for gluttony and a lack or control around food, before the company Christmas party I can plan exactly how much I’ll allow myself, perhaps eat a little beforehand so I am not hungry, seek to talk to people instead of prowling around the refreshments.

9. Look for the way of escape that God’s Word promises. So often when we’re thinking about doing something that, deep down, we know we shouldn’t, a “still, small voice” will be trying to talk sense to us and talk us out of it all the time we’re trying to justify it. We need to ask the Lord to help us, but we also need to take action and flee.

10. Yield to God. Give Him “the right of way.”

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God (Romans 6:13).

11. Follow the right way. The same verse that talks about “fleeing youthful lusts” goes on to tell us to “pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace” (2 Timothy 2:22). We need to concentrate as much or more on doing as on don’ting. Erwin Lutzer said in How to Say No to a Stubborn Habit that if someone tells you not to think of the number 8, all of a sudden that’s all you can think about. The best way to deal with a wrong thought is to replace it with another thought. We tend to follow what we focus on.

12. Behold Him.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord. II Corinthians 3:18

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Hebrews 4:15

Our sanctification as well as our salvation rests on the finished work of Christ. We don’t become any more or less saved or more or less loved when we sin. But sin keeps our relationship from the full fellowship we would otherwise enjoy, hinders our testimony, dishonors the Lord, and so many other things. God expects for His children to grow in Him. So when we do sin, we need to confess it and rest in the love of a Father who is more than ready to forgive.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Psalm 103:8

*I’ve been addressing people who are already born again and have become children of God. Forgiveness of sin and grace to overcome it is only possible when we have that relationship with God. If you’ve never believed on Christ as savior, please read more here.

(Sharing with Inspire Me Monday, Glimpses, Literary Musing Monday, Tell His Story, Woman to Woman Word-filled Wednesday, Coffee for Your Heart, Porch Stories, Faith on Fire)

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Here are more good reads discovered in the last week or so:

The Transgender Matrix: It’s Time to Choose the Red Pill, HT to Challies. From a man who had transgender surgery on why it didn’t solve his problems and facing reality. He had other issues, but those weren’t even dealt with before his psychologist approved him for surgery.

A Three-step Strategy for Fighting Sin, HT to Challies. Probably one of the most helpful articles I have seen on the subject. On the same topic from the same blog: 20 Practical Ways to Kill Sin.

5 Ways to Pray for Persecuted Saints, HT to Challies.

You Were Created for More Than Motherhood.

The Neglected Stepchild of the Bible, Ecclesiastes. There are some weird approaches to this book, and this article helps rightly divide it.

Do Christians Have to Care About Everything? HT to Challies. “You’re not Christ. You’re part of His body. And there is a difference.”

Happy Saturday!

Nice, but still a rebel

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You can hardly read Facebook, especially during election season or any kind of controversy, or just about any comments on anything online, without wishing people would be nicer to each other. We’re all so prone to forget the admonition to treat others with the same respect and grace with which we would want to be treated, especially when we deem them wrong in some way.

But is it possible to be thoroughly nice and still not right with God? Some years ago while reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, I came across a passage where he discusses that. It’s from the chapter “Beyond Personality” in a section concerning the truth that you can sometimes have an unsaved person who is actually nicer than some Christians. Lewis goes into many reasons for that which I won’t reproduce here, but one reason has to do with general disposition. Person A may be a quieter, calmer person and generally nice and personable, yet unsaved. Person B may have a more excitable personality and a fiery temper which the Lord has been giving him grace to overcome, and he may be a lot better than he was, yet compared with Person A he doesn’t seem as nice. Lewis then goes on to say (emphasis mine):

If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. “Why drag God into it?” you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered….

If you are a nice person — if virtue comes easily to you — beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.

….We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world — and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. 

If what you want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, “So there’s your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.” But if you once have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbors or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anesthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?

Jim Berg quotes Lewis in Changed Into His Image and then goes on to say:

Surprising as it may seem, there are many of us who really try to be good, not because we are allowing God to work in our lives to produce His fruit, but because it seems that life has fewer snags when we stay out of trouble. We often achieve the accolades and image we want. We can become smug around others who aren’t doing right and can become easily embittered during the times when we are being good and don’t get what we want.

We sometimes think we are pretty good people who “mess up” once in a while. The biblical picture is just the opposite: we are pretty bad people who do right only by the grace of God.

The true strength of my sinful heart…was not fully known to me until I resisted it.

“Being good” can be just our own way of making life work without God.

One of my friends had a hard time coming to the Lord for that very reason — she felt she was every bit as good as the people witnessing to her and therefore didn’t “need” to be saved. Thankfully the light finally broke through.

 The Bible tells us that “we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away” (Isaiah 64:6, KJV). Next to God’s blazing holiness, our righteousness is like filthy rags.

But how can that be, you might ask. You’re not promiscuous or hateful, you return the money when the cashier gives you too much back, you give to good causes, you drive the speed limit.

Think of it this way. Jesus said the greatest command is to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. So it follows that the greatest sin is breaking this commandment…and we all fail in that way several times a day. Plus the Bible tells our our heart is deceitful, so there are likely ways we sin that we don’t realize.

This is a paltry comparison, but imagine you have a favorite white shirt that still looks pretty good to you. But one day in the store you find another white shirt and decide to get it. When you bring it home and hang the new shirt next to your old one, you’re horrified. Your old shirt, which looked perfectly fine to you the day before, now looks grey and worn next to the bright new one.

The only righteousness that meets all the qualifications for heaven are His.

For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:2-4, ESV).

And be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith (Philippians 3:9, ESV).

Christ took our unrighteousness on Himself on the cross, and when we repent of our own way and believe on Him, He credits His righteousness to our account. As Chris Anderson’s hymn, “His Robes For Mine,” says:

His robes for mine: O wonderful exchange!
Clothed in my sin, Christ suffered ‘neath God’s rage.
Draped in His righteousness, I’m justified.
In Christ I live, for in my place He died.

So, I am all for being nice and wish the world contained more niceness. But before God, being nice is not enough. Instead of trying to make our own righteousness come up to Him, an impossible task, we need the righteousness that comes from Him. If, like me, you’ve made that exchange, rejoice with me in His grace. If not, I invite you to come to Him today.

(Revised from the archives. Sharing with Inspire Me Monday, Literary Musing Monday, Glimpses, Soul Survival, Tell His Story, Woman to Woman Word-filled Wednesday, Wise Woman)

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Here are some posts I found worth reading and sharing over the last couple of weeks:

The Dead End of Sexual Sin along with some advice from John Owen about overcoming sin of any kind.

Providential Dullness: An Easter Meditation. We give the disciples a hard time for missing that Jesus said He would rise again, but Luke 18:34 says, “this saying was hid from them.” Why would that be? Some good answers in this piece.

The Ones in the Front Row.“I cannot control the reception my children’s God-given callings receive out there in the wide world. But I can raise them to be appreciators of beauty, loveliness, and skill. Then, maybe they will be the ones in the front row, clapping their hearts out, whistling, standing and cheering at all the beauty the world holds for them.”

Thanks For Raising the Man of My Dreams! I hate mother-in-law jokes and did long before I became a m-i-l. I did have  relatively good relationship with mine. Here are some good thoughts to enhance that relationship.

10 Ways to Create a Home of Warmth and Grace.

How to Get Published.

For those who like Christian fiction, especially free Christian fiction, there’s a Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt going on this weekend with a possibility of winning 17-34 books from 30+ authors. Some of the individual authors are hosting their own giveaways as well.

Happy Saturday!