Me, Myself, and I
We sin because we desire or worship idols instead of God. The Bible talks about ‘the sinful desires of our hearts’. Whenever a desire controls our hearts it has become an idol. It can be a desire for a good thing which has become bigger than God. We need to turn from our sinful desires to worship and serve God = ‘repentance’. Repentance is a life-long, continuous activity of weeding out the roots of sin from our hearts. We repent by faith as we believe God is bigger and better than our sinful desires.
‘People tend to think of sins in the plural as consciously willed acts where one was aware of and chose not to do the righteous alternative … This instinctive view of sin infects many Christians and almost all non-Christians … The Bible’s view of sin certainly includes the high-handed sins … But sin also includes what we simply are, and the perverse ways we think, want, remember, and react. ‘Most sin is invisible to the sinner because it is simply how the sinner works… The core insanity of the human heart is that we violate the first great commandment. We will love anything, except God, unless our madness is checked by grace.
‘People do not tend to see sin as applying to relatively unconscious problems, to the deep, interesting, and bedevilling stuff in our hearts. But God’s descriptions of sin often highlight the unconscious aspect. Sin – the desires we pursue, the beliefs we hold, the habits we obey as second nature – is intrinsically deceitful. If we knew we were deceived, we would not be deceived … Sin is a darkened mind, drunkenness, animal-like instinct and compulsion, madness, slavery, ignorance, stupor. People often think that to define sin as unconscious removes human responsibility. How can we be culpable for what we did not sit down and choose to do? But the Bible takes the opposite track. The unconscious and semiconscious nature of much sin simply testifies to the fact that we are steeped in it. Sinners think, want, and act sinlike by nature, nurture, and practice.’ (David Powlison)
Tim Chester, You Can Change
