The Tenth Leper

If you’ve ever listened to a John Piper sermon, you’ve probably heard him talk about fighting sin by replacing sinful desires with superior pleasure in the glory of God for his supremacy manifested through Christ to the nations for his global cause.  (If you’ve listened to him, you get the joke.  If you haven’t, that didn’t make sense.  Keep reading!)  Basically, we grow in Christlikeness and experience victory over the sins we’ve been enslaved to by learning to find more joy in God than in sin (a process called “sanctification”).

A huge ally in the sanctification process is hatred of sin.  And while many Christians struggling with habitual sin know that they should hate their sin enough to forever flee from it, the reality is that a part of them still loves it.  And that can be confusing.  How can you love God so much, read his Word all the time, go to weekly accountability meetings, and still be enslaved to this sin?  Ultimately, I think it’s because we still love that sin deep down.  And I think the reason we still love it deep down is that we don’t hate it deep down. (Did I just blow your mind??)  So why don’t we hate it?

A big reason hatred for sin is lacking could be that we don’t see it for the cosmic treason that it is.  We give it less-than-horrible names and thus treat it lightly.  Or to say it another way, we just don’t call our sins for what they are, because to do so would be to face the ugly truth about ourselves.  Here are some examples of ways I’ve typically heard myself or others describe sin.

1. “I screwed up last night.”
2. “I’m struggling with anxiety.”
3. “I’m having a hard time getting in the Word.”
4. “Prayer hasn’t really been consistent.”

The problem with these phrases is that none of them sound that bad.  They succeed in getting across a “This isn’t ideal” vibe, but also a “Oh well no one’s perfect” one, and that’s the problem.  They don’t capture the magnitude of the fact that your sin cost Jesus his life.  Here’s the same list again, in the same order, worded now in such a way to capture what’s really going on:

1. “I looked at porn and masturbated.”
2. “I don’t trust in God’s goodness and provision.”
3. “Other things are just more important to me than God.”
4. “Prayer has no value to me.  I feel like God’s either not there or doesn’t care.”

Things like these are a lot harder to say.  The more specific we get with our sin, the more uncomfortable it becomes to confess it, because we’re starting to see it for what it really is.  The lines in the first list aren’t untrue.  But I don’t feel as terrible saying them since they’re sugar-coated.  When I go deeper though and say the words in the other list, I’m far more ashamed and disgusted.  It’s a lot more jolting.

Sin says something about how we view God.  When you’re anxious, you’re not really “struggling with anxiety.”  You’re struggling to believe that God loves you and is guiding your life according to his purposes.  When you’re “struggling” with inconsistent time in prayer, you’re struggling with a consistent arrogance that makes you feel like you don’t need God.  The tricky thing though is that we’re not always aware of these deeper heart issues.  Rather, things like praying to the almighty God of the universe are talked about in terms of personal discipline rather than personal obedience.  So when we’re not praying, we think the problem is our schedule (external) and not our hearts (internal).  And when we fail to pray, we feel like we’ve been defeated by something external rather than taking ownership for our own sin.  Jerry Bridges says it this way:

When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility.  I am saying something outside of me has defeated me.  But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me.  We may, in fact, be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey.

If we’re not calling sin for what it is and owning up to it, we’ll never learn to hate it.  Sin is personal, not abstract.  For example, if a wife catches her husband looking at porn, she’s going to take it personally.  What he’s doing says something about how he views her, in this case her desirability.  Similarly, sin says something about how we view God.  Struggling to find time to get in God’s Word isn’t primarily a discipline issue.  It’s an issue of you not finding God desirable enough to spend good quality time with him.

The process of sanctification is a long and painful one.  But it has an end, and it’s joyful along the way.  For the purposes of hating your sins and enjoying God, get good at calling sins for what they are.  And remember that the presence of the God you’ve offended is a safe place for doing that.

“Oh you who love the LORD, hate evil!”
-Psalm 97:10