There I go, again!

There I go, again!

As my irritation shifted into anger, I felt the heat creeping into my face, the surge of adrenalin racing through my body.  I was ready to go to battle! After I walked away and calm returned, I thought to myself, “there I go, again!”   The struggle with my temper is a life-long one.  Do I like it? Not at all. Am I controlled by it? No.  Is it sinful?  Yes, and for that reason, I submit it to Christ for His mastery.

Given differences in our personalities, training, experience, and circumstances each of us wrestles with different temptation.  Most of us deal with one or more of the so-called ‘seven deadly sins.’ They are wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.  In recent years we have tended to describe our struggles with sin in psychological rather than spiritual language.  Recovery is more sought after than repentance.  I am grateful for the science that studies human behavior and attempts to help us to  understand why we end up saying to ourselves, ‘there I go, again!’  But, I also recognize that to simply understand and explain behavior that God calls sin is an insufficient remedy.  Recovery can never make me right with God. Only repentance followed by receiving His grace restores and produces freedom – from guilt and from sin’s power over me.

Christians must never ‘make peace,’ with those things that God hates.  For example, if I excuse my anger as a ‘family trait,’ or part of my personality, I remain a slave to it. But, I must not deny the reality of it, either. That is why I take it to the Cross of Christ and find forgiveness, and pray for the Spirit to master it.  At same time, I work to understand why I choose to act in certain ways so I can recognize when the temptation is more likely to approach.

What’s your ‘besetting sin?’  Take a look at the Church’s list of the deadly sins again- wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony.  That’s not the prettiest side of humanity, is it?  God says we all sin; falling far short of the destiny for which He created us. Can you identify with this passage?  “When I want to do good, evil is right there with me.  For in my inner being I delight in God’s law;  but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am!”  (Romans 7:21, NIV)  Don’t make the tragic mistake of stopping there. Too many Christians do. We are not whole in the Spirit if we think that the only responses to our sins are either to make peace with them or to live with miserable guilt, day in and day out.

Paul goes on to declare emphatically that while we will find ourselves saying, “there I go, again,” there is freedom in Christ and  growth into a mature holiness which comes from the life of the Spirit developing in us. “With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, (religious rules about sin) weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God!" (Romans 8:1-5, The Message)

I hope you will not overly sentimentalize the Christmas story.  The Babe in the Manger is not just a nice story about God coming to earth.  It was His opening shot in the war on sin!  God came into the world, not to excuse our failures, but to defeat the evil and free us to live holy and whole lives by offering us the Gift of grace and forgiveness.  Let’s go beyond just knowing why we fail, to overcoming sin through our Savior.  "Life itself was in him, and this life gives light to everyone. The light shines through the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it." (John 1:4-5, NLT)  "To all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. They are reborn! This is not a physical birth resulting from human passion or plan—this rebirth comes from God. So the Word became human and lived here on earth among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the only Son of the Father." (John 1:12-14, NLT)

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Come Thou Long Expected Jesus

Come Thou long expected Jesus,

Born to set Thy people free.

From our fears and sins release us,

Let us find our rest in Thee.

Israel's strength and consolation,

Hope of all the earth Thou art.

Dear desire of every nation

Joy of every longing heart.

Born Thy people to deliver,

Born a child and yet a King!

Born to reign in us forever,

Now Thy gracious Kingdom bring!

By Thine own eternal Spirit

Rule in all our hearts alone.

By Thine all sufficient merit

Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

Charles Wesley | Christian Friedrich Witt

Public Domain