Sorry???

Have you seen yourself lately? No…have you really seen yourself lately. Not the front that we often put on. Not the “I got it all together”, “I got it under control” or the “I’m God’s #1 draft pick…where would the team be with out me” face that we throw on for our loved ones, friends, co-workers, fellow church members and neighbors. The fact of the matter is, we are not as put together and our lives are not a tight as they should be. We often deceive ourselves. We often avoid addressing those things in our lives that “mess up our look”. These things are commonly know as sin.

In our study last week we talked about sin and its relation to us. One of the points that was brought out was how we so very often get caught up in the game of masking our sin. We purposefully mislabel our sin to make it more acceptable to us. For example:
We call our stubbornness and unwillingness to change….Determination
We call our selfishness and unwillingness to share…Being good stewards
We call our self righteousness…Spirituality
We call our worrying…Being detail oriented
We call our greed…Getting what God has for me
We call lust…admiring God’s creation
We call coveting…getting and desiring the better things in life

I’m not saying that all of these are sins at all times, what I am saying that these may be blind spots in our lives that we may need the assistance of God and other believers to help us address these sins. We all have blind spots. Many times the things that “bother” us about other people and their actions are the very matters that we need to address in our lives. Human nature makes it is so easy to identify out OUR faults in the lives of OTHERS. It is human nature to do this, but God has called us to take on His nature and to be able to begin to see our sin for what it is and to be able to repent.

Another point that was made in the Bible study was that we sin and we confess our sin and then go about our business. We treat God like He is running a spiritual Jiffy Lube. We stop in…we confess and we go about our business until our next scheduled spiritual maintenance interval. This is not what God wants. God wants us to see our sin for what it is. He wants us to see the pain that it causes to us, others and to Him. He wants us to think about and appreciate the fact that He took our sin so seriously that He sent His son to die for us. If we confess, God will forgive, but when we repent, God will restore and He will be honored. Repentance is turning away from your sin. Confession is the momentary acknowledgement of the act. Repentance is the corrective action that you take in your life so that when you are faced with a similar temptation or circumstance, you can be victorious over the sin, because you have made up in your mind beforehand that you are not going to succumb. I can attest to the fact that there is a special joy that you get when you are victorious over a sin that you struggled with in the past.

Think back to your childhood or think about how you deal with your kids when they do something wrong. Are kids supposed to just continue to dishonor their parents or disobey the same rules over and over and over and over again and just say “sorry” to fix things? Sorry is not enough. Parents will often say, “What are you sorry for? Or Do you have anything to be sorry about? Or What are you going to do the next time?” The point is to address the behavior so that fewer “sorry’s” will be needed in the future. This “conventional wisdom” has spiritual implications. Ultimately God doesn’t want our “sorry’s”, God wants us to choose His way up front so that “sorry” will not come out of our mouths as often. Are you sorry that you got caught or are you sorry for what you have done and it’s impact it has had and the pain it has caused.

If we choose Godliness upfront…we won’t be “Sorry” later.

Be Blessed,
B

Have you ever been broken or felt the pain of the sin of others? In our recent study, we talked about Ezra. Ezra helped to usher in a revival in the people of God and it all started with a spirit of repentance that he had for the sin that he witnessed in the lives of God’s people. He had not taken part of the sin, but he bore the burden of the sin on his heart and saw the collision path that God’s people were on with the consequences of their sin that they had not repented of.

I began to think about how I have allowed these principles to work in my life. I’ve felt the burden of the guilt of my own sin, but it was not until recently that I’ve began to be sensitive to the weight and the impact of the sin of God’s people. Just like the Israelites, God’s people today have allowed sins that we have not repented of put us under captivity, humiliation and at the mercy of the enemies of God. Some of these sins are subtle but their impact is not. Some of these sins are:

*Lowering God’s standards in our lives and allowing the World’s standards to become the norm in our culture and in our churches

*Lack of prioritizing God’s Word in our daily lives. We make time for everything else but daily devotions. Just as we wouldn’t or shouldn’t go a day with washing ourselves externally, we should not go a day without checking our spiritual B.O. (Body Odor). Many of God’s people are walking around stinking on the inside and the world can smell us and are repulsed by us and therefore aren’t drawn to God because our lives stink.

*Lack of compassion toward people. We often allow how much we think it will cost us to help others to actually prevent us from actually helping others.

*Lack reverence for God. God is loving and wants to have a personal relationship with us, but He is still God. We must come humbly to him with respect for Him and who He is. We have “dumbed” down who God is and we do not approach him with fear and trembling. It’s not that we should approach God like the cowardly lion approached the Wizard of Oz, but should recognize His power and appreciate who He is.

*Lack of recognition of the stain that sin causes on our lives. Sin is serious and will stain our lives. God HATES SIN!!!! We tolerate it and make excuses for its presence in our lives.

These are just a few of the sins that we as God’s people have allowed to take root in our lives and in the church. We as God’s people need to have our hearts heavy as we recognize them and desire for a revival in our lives and in the Church. It is time to not just look in our own house but in the house of God as well. We need each other as members of the same body, so if I’m not operating at full capacity because of the sin in my life, you will suffer and the body of Christ is not acting as effectively and efficiently as it could be. My sin has a negative impact on you so just so I should be torn by your sin and you should be torn by my sin.

This is a new way of thinking for most of us, but it is the key to revival in the kingdom. We must revolutionize our way of thinking if we are going to have a spiritual revolution in the body of Christ.