My indwelling sin has flared up again. I'm not sure what triggered it exactly the last time I dealt with it was about 3 years ago when I was still in college. I think what caused it then was I prayed to God that he would show me my sin and that all I would want was Him. Unfortunately since I didn't learn from my past I'm doomed to repeat it and recalling last week on my way to work I prayed this same exact type of prayer to God. If you don't want to go spiritually insane don't pray that prayer. I have had shameful thoughts all weekend not allowing me a moment of spiritual joy to myself. My "inner goddess" has flared up again. You know, the desire to be admired and in control of people? Only that can happen in my mind though since I don't actively do it in real life. The problem is that I didn't practice beating my body and making it my slave early in my Christian walk so I'm going to have to work harder now than before.
I think what has led me slip into believing I'm okay and unaware of this indwelling sin is my false view of grace. I have cheapened it. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it:
That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.
Cheap grace is the grace I have bestowed on myself. This false grace, my inner goddess fooled me into believing that I could be made right with God without repentance or the realization of my actual need of God. That I could be made right with God because Jesus has covered me and therefore I can live and think in the ways I want. The refusal to believe that God hates my sin and if I love God I would hate it too.
My thoughts have brought me to Paul in Romans 6 where he states:
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
I want to walk into that newness of life again. Maybe I am and I can't see it but I really want it. I don't want to be a slave to my sin but to Christ's righteousness. The lyrics of an old hymn have been playing through my mind tonight:
My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord O my soul!If only I can recognize this sin has actually been nailed to the cross because it seems to be living and active right now within my spirit.
I think it's time for me to pick up the Mortification of Sin by John Owen again. This indwelling sin will be dead to me.
