10/03/2021
I realized this morning that I have become a little apathetic of late. Not that I don’t love God, I do, very much. Not that I don’t hate my sin, I just haven’t had my face pressed to the floor mourning it with him lately. In reality that isn’t a place we want to be all the time. We can’t spend our lives on the floor, we would have no time to live for him. The reason I say apathy is because sometimes lately, when I sin, my prayer for forgiveness aren’t heartfelt. Typing the words, “apologizing out of obligation” seemed too hard to write in that last sentence. But they needed to be said. We will always be very unsuccessful at hiding the truth from God- he built every fiber of our hearts and minds with dust from the ground and his very own breath. He knows intimately, every twist and turn, every hiding place; because we are nothing really but the work of his hands. We, however, can be very successful at hiding things from ourselves. If sin lives in my heart I have to search it out, before it spreads. For I have to ask forgiveness to be forgiven. I have to admit to a sin before he can wash it away. Sin is nothing but a barrier between us and God. If sin is occupying a crevice in your heart, that is a place God will not occupy. He will not fight us over our idols. He will remove them for us if we ask, but he will not fight us over them.
I wrote something in a journal, a long time ago, about a feeling I had gathered with a group of Christians friends. I said that “God’s presence was so palpable I felt as if he was just beyond my fingertips in any direction.” I felt that there was nothing but sheerest fabric separating me from standing in God’s presence. I could see his light and feel his warmth so precisely and so keenly I felt as if I could sustain myself on that alone. There are so many things, everything, I would give up if God requires it of me. I don’t need the things of this world- they mean nothing. If he would have me live without enough food, without shelter, without comfort I would do it gladly. Whatever cross he would have me carry, I will carry with a grateful heart. When it is my time to die I will happily enter his presence scarred, bruised and bleeding; if it be his will. My very existence is his to do with what he sees fit. I just want to live my life, every day of it, in the good times and the bad, with God residing just beyond my fingertips.
And for that reason it is my very serious business to have one hand on the blade that God would use to carve the sin from the flesh of my heart.
Some verses I had in mind while writing this:
“then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Genesis 2:7 ESV
“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 ESV
“Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
James 1:13-15 ESV
“Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.”
Jonah 2:8 ESV
“They served their idols, which became a snare to them.”
Psalm 106:36 ESV
But most importantly remember:
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
Romans 15:13 ESV
