Heart matters

Every day in the course of reading the Scriptures and praying, I am forced to come back to the question of how seriously I take my sin. Not the external actions, but the demands of my heart to do those things, the bent in my nature that drives me towards the things that hurt me and pull me away from the fullness of joy in God. The only conclusion I can come to is that I don't take it seriously enough. I have been more successful in battling it of late, but I still fear living in true openness and confession of what I struggle with even though I know, on every level, what sort of joy is set before me. I'm writing this perhaps as more of a reminder to myself than anything.

When I'm face to face with sin it pulls at me. It's not unattractive in its way--after all, why do something if it doesn't appeal to you? Whether it's lust in thinking about a woman or wanting to look at pornography, pride in asserting my own will over God's or desiring to be a king instead of a servant to the people who are around me, or any of the other myriad of sins that my heart would or does perpetrate, I see the appeal at the time...but even in that I see the danger and the result. I know where it will drive my heart and my mind, and what sort of person I'll become in my actions--not one I am proud of by any means.

When I surrender to my sinful nature instead of fighting it, I become a man filled with fear--not "Oh no, God's gonna punish me now cuz I was naughty," but just the fear of everything in life. Fear of the loss of control, fear of the loss of--well, anything and everything. It becomes almost a level of paranoia, of me trying desperately to hold onto what's not really mine in the first place. When I surrender I find myself pulled away from God--not pushed away, but that I pulled myself away in my own pride. Every step of the way from there is marked with frustration and anger, and even in those times when I'm just wandering in the desert and I try to pray I just can't find the words. I end up feeling like I'm just saying stuff to try to make myself feel better.

Let me clarify: this is not "I committed a single sin, so therefore God has cast me out." What I'm describing is where I have discovered myself after allowing myself to enter a pattern of repeated sin, and tried to salve the pain of it with more of the same. It's where I brought myself, and where God rescued me from by His Spirit, convicting me, moving me to confess and be open, reminding me to be open-handed with all that I have because it's not mine. I thank God that he pulled me from that place. It's in meditating on this and on the fact that my salvation has not one bloody thing to do with my own goodness but instead rests entirely on Christ, on the cross, that I find the greatest peace and strength in my life.

When I do focus on this, looking down the road to God and hoping for Him above all things, I find myself able to understand why Paul said of the fruit of the Spirit, "against such things there is no law." (Gal. 5:23) If I want to throw myself into all the stuff that feels good now that's always an option--but in those things I am putting myself back up to judgment by the law, and in that there is absolutely no hope of passing. I cannot grow closer to Christ while I seek in my heart and through my deeds to do and think what is wicked.

The closeness with God I find in the Body of Christ, the deep longing in my soul for more and the delight I want to take in him is what I crave more of, on a level I can't put into words that would adequately describe it. I want to be the sort of man who in all things fully fits the concept of the title I put on this blog. It's easy for me to take pleasure in God when things are good and I'm working and can pay my bills. As terrible as the idea sounds, I pray that God will mold me into a man who can be faced with the greatest loss of his life--whatever that may be--and in that moment find his greatest joy, his only real joy, in knowing that God is still in control, that His hand is still guiding everything and that there is nothing that happens no matter how difficult or painful that does not work for the best. I don't know what that is going to look like in my life...I have to be honest, I'm afraid to find out. But that is the sort of man I know I want to be, more than anything else, and I pray for the strength to know that day and to know on that day that God is great, that He is good and does good, and that He is more valuable than anything.

What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15-23)

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my food
day and night,
while they say to me all the day long,
"Where is your God?"
These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I would go with the throng
and lead them in procession to the house of God
with glad shouts and songs of praise,
a multitude keeping festival.

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God. (Psalms 42:1-6)