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 - Endorsed - Indifferent - Contested
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| The Nashville Statement
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Name:Daniel
Home: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
About Me: I used to believe that evolution was reasonable, that homosexuality was genetic, and that people became Christians because they couldn't deal with the 'reality' that this life was all there was. I used to believe, that if there was a heaven - I could get there by being good - and I used to think I was more or less a good person. I was wrong on all counts. One day I finally had my eyes opened and I saw that I was not going to go to heaven, but that I was certainly going to suffer the wrath of God for all my sin. I saw myself as a treasonous rebel at heart - I hated God for creating me just to send me to Hell - and I was wretched beyond my own comprehension. Into this spiritual vacuum Jesus Christ came and he opened my understanding - delivering me from God's wrath into God's grace. I was "saved" as an adult, and now my life is hid in Christ. I am by no means sinless, but by God's grace I am a repenting believer - a born again Christian.
My complete profile...
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Daniel's posts are almost always pastoral and God centered. I appreciate and am challenged by them frequently. He has a great sense of humor as well.
- Marc Heinrich
His posts are either funny or challenging. He is very friendly and nice.
- Rose Cole
[He has] good posts, both the serious like this one, and the humorous like yesterday. [He is] the reason that I have restrained myself from making Canadian jokes in my posts.
- C-Train
This post contains nothing that is of any use to me. What were you thinking? Anyway, it's probably the best I've read all day.
- David Kjos
Daniel, nicely done and much more original than Frank the Turk.
- Jonathan Moorhead
There are some people who are smart, deep, or funny. There are not very many people that are all 3. Daniel is one of those people. His opinion, insight and humor have kept me coming back to his blog since I first visited earlier this year.
- Carla Rolfe
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| The Blindness of Sin (In 5 Minutes or Less) |
" There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil." - Job 1:1 [NASB]
Do you see that Job turned away from evil?
The blindness of sin happens when we stop thinking of sin as evil. When we think of sin as just something we struggle with, or worse, just a character flaw, or something that is merely bad.
It is easy to embrace sin and still feel pretty good about yourself if you forget that what you are embracing is actually evil. You are embracing evil. When scripture speaks of having the forehead of a harlot, and refusing to blush (c.f. Jeremiah 3:3) or not knowing how to blush (c.f. Jeremiah 6:5, 8:12), it is talking about what happens when a person stops thinking of sin as an evil thing.
You have heard the expression, "making peace with sin" - and you imagine that it is painting a person who has decided to stop worrying about sin, and just live life as best as they can or something like that. But people make peace with sin long before that. The first step in making peace with sin is to emasculate sin - removing the gender of evil from it - so that when you "struggle" against sin, you are not struggling against evil, you are struggling against something you "shouldn't be doing".
Now I know that victory over habitual behaviours can take time. I likewise know that obeying God is not easy, that there is a war going on between the will of God and the will of the flesh, and that war often includes real (spiritual) battles. But we use the word struggle when we really mean near consistently giving into cyclically reoccurring sinful desires. We mean that we know a thing is sin, and we don't want to do it, and we are struggling under the weight of guilt that comes with this kind of failure, and especially with the certainty in our hearts that we don't really plan to do anything about it beyond feel bad that we are sinning.
That's not struggle friend. That is surrender, followed by guilt. That is loving darkness rather than light because your deeds are evil. That's what it looks like.
One of the ways our enemy snares us, is with blindness. We stop seeing what we are doing as evil, and so we stop turning from it. We are just failing to do what is right. We want to do what is right, but as Paul writes, we cannot find the way to do it. The reason we cannot find the way is because we are double minded - we want to be righteous without actually turning away from sin.
Here is what I want you to take away from this post. Today you have already settled it in your heart that you are either going to make war against every evil you find in your own desires, or you have settled it in your heart that you are going to fail and have decided to live with the guilt of that. I suggest that if you open your eyes and see evil for what it is, if you look and see what you are doing, that you may, at least this day, awake out of your habit of slumber, and turn from evil, calling it what it is, and abhorring it as is fitting a servant of God.Labels: Advice, quick snips, sin is evil |
posted by Daniel @
6:23 AM
4 comment(s)
 
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| Not Bad, but Evil. |
Don't call sin bad. I can get a bad haircut, but sin isn't bad, it's evil. Call the sin you do "evil" Let your conscience drink in that truth, and don't squirm out from under it. Sin is evil, and every time you sin, you bring more of it (evil) into the world.
You need to be saved from it, and not merely in it.
We all know that sin is evil, but somehow, when it comes to our sin, then sin is just a mistake, or a bad habit. We gotta stop playing games like that. Call sin evil, meditate on what evil really is, and allow the weight of your participation in it to affect your conscience. You will need a tender conscience if you ever hope to battle evil.
Don't look at the world and image it became evil without your help.Labels: sin is evil |
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posted by Daniel @
12:14 PM
2 comment(s)
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