But [God] gives a greater grace. (James 4:6, NASB)
It’s an ugly riddle, but we may still be in love with our sin.
We may recognize our sin and turn from our sin and hate our sin. And yet we may still love our sin.
Consider the golfer who has spent many years playing the local muni. It’s a tolerable course, but it’s rough around the edges and nowhere in the league of the nearby country club. Now let’s say this golfer comes upon a windfall, an inheritance, and she finds herself with disposable income that allows her to join the club. So she does. And there she finds enjoyable friendships for regular games, and she delights in the condition and challenge of the course.
This all sounds so perfect. But what if I told you that every time this woman met up with old friends and started talking of golf, she spoke only of the muni and said nothing of her new club? Wouldn’t you find this a strange emphasis in her focus?
And yet that is the same trap we often fall into regarding our sin. We say it is part of our “old self,” and yet we speak of it as if it is the real emphasis of our minds and hearts even now. Thinking we are humble in doing so, we say things like this: “Oh, don’t praise me. If you could only see my sinful insides.”
But here’s what we know to be the greater thrust of Scripture: God’s greater grace.
Humility toward ourselves means delivering higher praise to others—and chiefly to our God. And thus, when we spend time speaking heavily of our sin, we rob him of time we could spend praising (and thanking) him. There’s nothing humble about stealing God’s praise!
We write often enough about the seriousness of sin in our devotions here. You know that we give sin its full weight in terms of the damage it does to our eternal destiny if we do not seek God’s forgiveness. But if you have made that move under his blood-stained covering and you make a habit of including in your prayers the very thing that Jesus taught us to pray: “…forgive us our trespasses…”—if you have done these things, then the glory is no longer in your sinfulness. It is wholly in his grace.
We may fall back into our sins from time to time, in the same way our country club golfer may mindlessly drive to her old muni by mistake. But that is no longer where we dwell. In fact, only a time or two in the New Testament (depending on your translation) are believers referred to as sinners; many times over they are referred to as saints. Only Jesus makes it so! Let our emphasis in speaking of our life in him, then, be on him. Let’s stop giving even the smallest praise to our sin. Confess it, cast it off, and come fully to Christ!
—
Jeff Hopper
July 2, 2012
Copyright © 2012 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday through Friday at www.linksplayers.com.