the enemy

Last year, I took this counseling class. It's basic premise was self-counseling before you start to counsel others. It was all about confronting yourself, and getting to the truth of who you are. I was scared to death. I knew I couldn't handle the truth. Deep down, I'm a scary person. No offense, but we all are.

I read the most incredible books during that class, and they rarely are far from me. I was going over one of the books recently just to refresh my mind. I have to do that whenever I find myself “acting” or becoming a little “holier-than-thou.” There are times when I look at my life and justify the sin because of all the good I am doing. So I have to face the truth about myself. In this book, The Enemy Within, the author, Kris Lundgaard, mentions the battle Paul refers to in Romans 7. He says that the sin living within us is a law. Lundgaard says, “Paul uses 'law' as a metaphor. He needs a way to express the power, authority, constraint, and control that sin wields in our lives, and he picks 'law' with a touch of irony.” The author continues by using the law of gravity as an example. It's a force that causes objects to obey it's will. The same is true of the sin in our lives. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” (Pogo).

See even when we try to be the best we can, we still fall short. We will always be fighting the battle against our own sin nature. Lundgaard continues by saying, “Few people have come to terms with the law of sin. If more people had, we would hear more complaints of it in prayers, see more struggling against it, and find less of its fruit in the world.”

A professor recently mentioned, its not about how little or insignificant our sin is, but how great the God is that we are offending with our sin. The cost of our sin has to be considered. Christ paid it all with His life. Our “small, insignificant” sins have a very high price. While we are forgiven by God, we still have to face the consequences of our sin.

I wrote out this blog and left it unfinished before heading to my classes. Then the chapel speaker touched on this very topic. “Touched” might be a slight understatement. He actually hammered on this subject. He said too often “we are quick to worship and slow to confess.” Roy Hession states in his book Calvary Road, “We pray long to be cleansed from some sin and for peace to be restored to our hearts, but unless we are willing to be broken on the point in question and be made a partaker of the Lamb's humility there, nothing will happen. Every sin we commit is the result of the hard unbroken self taking up some attitude of pride, and we shall not find peace through the blood until we are willing to see the source of each sin and reverse the wrong attitude that caused it by a specific repentance, which will always be humbling.”

That's the bad news. The good news is although He is a holy and righteous God, He is forgiving and loving. No matter how far we fall, it's never too far for Him and His love. The self-confrontation class was difficult, eye-opening, and hard to swallow, but it was then that I truly learned the depth of my depravity and the depth His love. It absolutely blows my mind.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-39 NIV)