The "Rogue" Theologian

There is a reality that often does not sink into the minds of believers because we simply see our sins on a superficial level. We make excuses, deny responsibility, rationalize and even lie to ourselves about the very severity of our sins. We have become accustomed to marginalizing our sin in an effort to hide the reality of it. Far too often we point to someone else’s sin as worse than ours in some vain attempt to misdirect the powerful truth that we have done wrong. Yet, if we were to be completely honest with ourselves and totally upfront with our fellow believers we would discover that what we have done is no worse in the eyes of God than anyone else around us. For you see my friends, when we sin, we are, whether our sin in human eyes is great or small, grieving the Holy Spirit.

The sad part of this reality is that we often do not think that far down the road. “Well no one got hurt” or “it only effected me” are some of the excuses that we, and yes I mean we, will use to justify our actions instead of taking responsibility for what we have done. I am just as guilty, if not more, than everyone else. It is easy to understand why Paul believed himself to be the “chief among sinners”. Paul truly understood that his sins grieved the Holy Spirit. Surely we can all relate to the moment in life when we have committed such a heinous action as to desire labeling ourselves as the “chief among sinners” but how often would we assign ourselves this title for our daily sins?

You see there is no difference between the “big” sin and the “little” sin. In the eyes of a holy and righteous God they are the same. They bare the same consequence for “the wages of sin is death”. Not the wages of big sin or the wages of some sin, but rather the wages of all sin! The gravity of our sin is such that it requires our death. We struggle to rationalize this in our human minds because we cannot grasp how all sins can equally grieve the Holy Spirit. It is simply beyond our level of comprehension that my lie should be as much an affront to God as another man’s murder. Yet the reality remains the same, we are all sinners and we all grieve the Holy Spirit when we act in contradiction to what is righteous in the eyes of God.

However, I would be remiss if I were to let someone believe that the story stops there. It doesn’t! While our sins certainly do grieve the Holy Spirit, God has made a way for us to be brought into a right relationship with Him. The substitutionary and atoning work of Christ on the cross of Calvary is the great joy, which we share as believers. We can be redeemed when we choose repentance from the sins that have ensnared us. I am reminded of the story of the prodigal son. While he abandoned all that was right and squandered his life, his father still welcomed him home with open arms and a loving heart. This is a great example of how we should respond as believers when we are approached by repentant sinners.

Though there is no easy way for us, as humans, to simply forget sin, as the Lord does, I truly believe that He can remove the pain from our hearts when we sin and are sinned against. He can make it so that we too are like the father or the son in the story of the prodigal son. When we have sinned and we realize we have grieved the Holy Spirit, we repent and seek to be reunited with those we have sinned against and the God we have grieved, then we can find the “peace which passes all understanding”. There is such great hope in the mercy and grace and love of the God who so uniquely formed each one of us to be special and precious in His eyes and His kingdom. May we fully know and never forget the awesome power of our sin which grieves the Holy Spirit and the even more transcending power of the Holy Spirit to set right what we have made wrong in our hearts and in our minds!

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There exists in the heart of every human being a great divide. There is a portion of the heart which desires a life filled with happiness and security and there is a portion which desires a life filled with joy and truth. You see there is a great difference between these two sides because there is a great difference between happiness and joy, between security and truth. Happiness seeks to indulge the flesh with the trappings of the pleasures of this world. These temporal and often quickly fleeting moments never seem to offer a fulfillment as they have promised to do. Instead they bring with them pain, suffering and, ultimately, destruction. Happiness seeks to gratify the very antithesis of this perceived reality, which is joy.

Joy is not something that we simply stumble upon or happen to find in moments of fleeting pleasure. Rather joy is the complete manifestation of a life that has been surrendered to the realities of truth and the complexities of life which demand our understanding of the very fleetingness of happiness. Joy doesn’t exist to satisfy our temporary desires or to provide us with the whimsical wants of our everyday existence. Instead joy exists to provide us with a sustained and honest hope that the life we live is somehow more than we can see and comprehend through the feeble lens of our own human understandings.

Have you ever seen the sun breaking over the horizon at first light? You can almost feel the air as the dew settles and the warmth of the sun begins to glow on your face. There is a great peace that seems to be present in the morning. The cool rushes of wind that have plagued the dark night with bitterness and cold seem to fade away as the dawning of new life burgeons in the blossoming of our hearts. The soft and sweet orchestral sounds of birds arising like a chorus, intended to please the very ears of God, break forth with harmonious depth and unified glory. The sun peaks over the horizon and for a few moments, even perhaps just one, there is a peace which is externally displayed as a reminder of the internal truth of the great Scriptural proverb which states that “joy cometh in the morning”.

This small glimpse of an eternally existent and inwardly sought after truth is perhaps one of the greatest reminders we are ever given of the unfailing love and overwhelming grace of the God of all creation. You see, even in the midst of the greatest of turmoil, this one truth cannot be replaced. It cannot be replaced because it is truth. Truth, which like the reality of our human frailty, cannot be ignored for too long because it will continue to terry; simply waiting for the right moment to express itself to a heart that is longing for it. A heart which longs to feel security but cannot because it has not first sought truth. You see security is a desire of the flesh but one that has been created by God to be met.

The problem we face is that we seek to meet this desire through human conquest and personal achievement rather than through the surrender of our hearts to the Author of all life, the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Security is part of His plan but it cannot exist apart from, and without being secondary to, truth. You see truth will set the foundations for security by providing an authentic and reality based, objective viewpoint of the complexities of life which require us to be not trapped by our ever-changing emotions but open to the hard learned and often missed concept that truth will likely crush our fleshly desires while simultaneously exalting our desire for God and His saving love. This ultimate desire of our hearts exists in places in our hearts which we often do not open up and search. We find ourselves lost in the heart wrenching and death gripping pain of searing loss because we simply cannot bring ourselves to a place where we are willing and able to accept the truth of our need to die daily to ourselves and our desires and to seek the truth and joy that comes from a life lived totally abandoned to the will of God.

It comes down to one simple fact: we must choose. We must choose to seek when we hear the still small voice calling. We must choose to acknowledge that we cannot find true joy apart from the Creator. We must choose to love even when love seems to not exist or we desire instead to hate. We must choose to seek righteousness instead of the desires of our flesh. We must choose to die daily to ourselves and to be brought back to life through the transforming and overwhelmingly powerful blood of Christ which was shed that we may go beyond knowing our Creator and actually be brought to a place of justification, sanctification and glorification that we might live both our temporal and eternal lives at peace and in concert with the One True God!!

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