Growth

Our Offense

Recently, I’ve had a little mini-series on sin (If you’ve missed the posts, you can find them here, here, here. and here.) I’ll be honest, it’s not a topic most people want to read about. After, people would much rather read about the better things ahead, then what changes need to happen in the here and now. But I wrote anyway.

Today’s topic may be even less appealing, but it’s important too. For after a discussion about our sin before God, a natural follow-up is to wonder about when people sin against us. (You can see this connection in Matthew 18 verses 7-9 followed by verses 10-14.) After all, we know that a righteous God demands holiness and we want others to treat us according to that standard. But here are two important things to remember:

1. We’re not God.

2. We’re not holy.

So we have no business thinking that we can hold other people to the same standard that God does – in their relationship with us.

Which means, when someone sins against us, we are commanded to forgive. Regardless of whether they deserve it, regardless of how hurt we were, regardless of the consequences we’ve suffered as a result, we are not to hold on to that offense.

And if we do, now we’re the ones in sin. We’ve taken what may be righteous anger and we’ve made it into something that’s abhorrent to God – a hardened heart. We’ve stopped being concern about how their sin affects their relationship with God, and started focusing on how their sin affects us. We’ve held on tight to the repentance we deserve to see, rather than the repentance that’s needed before God.

We’ve taken their sin and made it into our own.

That’s what unforgiveness does. And that’s why God says, regardless of how often or how much is required, when someone sins against you, you are to forgive.

Because God cares more about our standing before Him, then how others stand before us.

And we should too.

(For a great book on sin, check out The Enemy Within by Kris Lundgaard.)

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Growth

Slippery Slope

In rhetoric, you often hear of slippery slope arguments. The term is used to describe stances or ways of thinking that once you go down, you have to accept a a whole host of other beliefs and propositions too – and these propositions may be things that you would normally be opposed too . For example, if you say the government has a right to invade its citizens’ privacy if the invasion serves a greater good, then you have to ask who defines the greater good. Depending on who defines the standard it could lead to a situation in which citizens’ privacy is invaded in order to serve the government’s interest, rather than what is of the greatest good for the citizenry. And if you aren’t comfortable with a government that has this liberty  of invading citizens’ privacy based on their own determination of good, then you shouldn’t argue for the government’s right to invade its citizens’ privacy at all. And that’s how a slippery slope works, one argument leads to the next, until an end (usually a nefarious one) is demonstrated.

Sometimes sin can work the same way. We get started down a path where we make a wrong decision and in order to justify or cover it up, we make another wrong decision. That bad decision leads to the next until we’re someplace that we never thought we’d be.  Wrong decision after wrong decision hardens our heart, and soon we’re rapidly descending down the slippery slope.

What gets us started on this path?

Often, it is a wrong view of God that pushes us off this precipice. We begin to think less of God than He is, and so we started convincing ourselves that the “small” sins don’t matter.  We compromise our commitment to God a little and before we know it, we start compromising it a lot.

A popular country song illustrates this principle well. The lyrics state “When you’re going through hell, keep on moving, don’t stop now, if you’re scared don’t show it, you might get through it before the devil even knows you’re there.” This little ditty may seem harmless enough until we realize the seriousness of the words. Hell isn’t something that you go through and get out of; hell is eternal separation from God. When we dilute the significance of what life apart from God means, we begin diminishing our understanding of the benefits of life with God. And what seemed like an innocuous tune on the radio, starts compromising the rightful position that God occupies in our life. We diminished Him in our minds, and before you know it, we also start diminishing Him in our words and actions as well.

Slippery slopes are so named for a reason. Once you get started down one, they are hard to stop. May we be ever vigilant to guard our minds against their attacks, and may we valiantly maintain a rightfully high view of our Savior.

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