James 1:21-24
“Some want to live within the sound of Church or chapel bells; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.” - - C.T Studd
James 1:21-24
“Therefore get rid of all moral filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.”
It was said by the Puritans that hypocrisy and sin will clip the wings of confidence in our Christian walks. We live in one of the most, if not the most superficial age of man. Whether it is the virtue signaling of the secular majority or the quality of life projected through social media platforms, most of our culture is grasping at an outward appearance of goodness. But we, as sinners saved by grace, know the gravity of our own sin and how that daily battle can take footholds in our lives if not addressed and brought to the light.
We have many examples recorded in scripture of godly men that overlooked sin and injustice and as a result allowed it to manifest to great devastation. One of these examples was recorded in the second book of Samuel in the life of King David and his children. David was referred to as a man after God’s own heart, but the Bible does not shy away from the magnitude of sin in David’s life. David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Urijah is often the “go to passage” for examining the up’s and down’s of his life. But there are also the sins of David as a father when it came to his children.
It is recorded in 2nd Samuel that David’s son Amnon raped his half sister and daughter of David, Tamar. The law called for the punishment of death for Amnon for this egregious violation but David’s response was that of negligence and no such punishment or sentence was carried out. Many commentators note that the guilt of David’s former sexual sins could have played a major role on his conscious and his inability to act upon the crimes of his son Amnon toward his daughter Tamar. This lack of justice would lead to Tamar’s brother Absalom two years later revenge killing his half brother Amnon and revolting against his father in open war.
This is magnified in chapter 16 when David is fleeing the country and a man of the house of Saul openly mocks him, v7, “And Shimei said as he cursed, “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless man!” As a result, David’s servants ask for permission to go and behead Shimei, but David in his guilt and heavy heart rebukes them and accepts the verbal abuse in sorrow.
The blessed gift of scripture is it does not ‘sugar coat’ the darkness and brokenness of this world, even amongst God’s people. David was a man of great sin, but he also was a man of repentance. The heaviness of sin is that it sears our conscious and leaves scars on our memories by the damage we inflict on ourselves and others. But what a gift of discipline from our loving Father to have such conviction!
Pastor Voddie Baucham has wisely preached that The Lord will cast our sins as far as the east is from the west, but that does not mean I have the ability to do so with my memories. As we move through this life of sanctification as believers we will sin, this is certain. But the loving discipline of our Father is that as we are filled with the Holy Spirit and by our convictions and memories of the damage that our sin does, we strive more and more to the conformity of our lives to our Savior that bled and died for that sin. How can I be apathetic to sin when that same sin led my King to suffocate and die for me?
Sin is slavery, and to be rid of it we must grab it by the hair, drag it to the foot of the cross and declare my Savior died and rose again to free me of your bondage. But this takes honesty; honesty with ourselves and a meekness to not only project righteousness but embrace it at the deepest levels of conviction. We must strive for integrity. Not integrity that is hypocritical or self-serving, but an integrity that can stand the test of true time knowing our God and King knows and sees the heart of every man.
As first responders this must be a reality of our calling and ordained roles. How can we freely execute justice and equity when we ourselves are living in habitual sin and un-repentance. This spiritual warfare will bleed through the lines of our carnal world and the trauma and severity of the jobs we face. Whether it manifest in apathy to those we are called in God’s providence to serve or an overlooking of injustice because our own conscious to evil is shaded and bruised, we must drag the spirit of this age to the cross and rebuke this slavery. We must be slaves to Christ, and the self-less service to our fellow man we all swore an oath to uphold. Our strength is not our own, and our greatest battle is within our own hearts to not only be professors of the Word…but doers.
Ephesians 3:14-21
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that He would give you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being firmly rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or understand, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.”
“Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.” – John Calvin
James Doyle 6L13 ~May 2024~