New Morning Mercies #325

No need to deny, rationalize, or otherwise excuse away evidence of your sin. God wouldn’t have sent his Son if your sin were not real.

• “I think you misunderstood me.”
• “I wasn’t angry, just emphasizing an important point.”
• “It wasn’t lust; I’m just a man who enjoys beauty.”
• “I wasn’t feeling well.”
• “I just have a strong personality.”
• “I think you’re being too judgmental.”
• “No harm, no foul.”
• “It wasn’t a lie, just another way of looking at things.”
• “Sometimes you have to choose the better of two evils.”
• “I was planning on giving it back.”
• “It wasn’t gossip. I was just asking them to pray.”
• “I’m not proud, just exercising God-given leadership gifts.”
• “I had to defend myself.”

The list could go on and on. We’re all so good at doing it. We’re all so skilled at convincing ourselves that our sin is less than sin and that we are more righteous than we actually are. In the end, it’s all a big insult to the God who controlled every situation, location, and person in every moment of human history so that at the perfect time his Son could come for the express purpose of forgiving us for and delivering us from the very thing that we are minimizing. It is a scandal of self-righteous unbelief, a refusal to take God at his word when he says that we are in a bad condition apart from his grace. It is destructive pride rearing its ugly head. Why destructive pride? It’s destructive because it is only when you humbly admit the depth of your unrighteousness and the impossibility of independently altering that condition that you begin to cry out for and get excited about redeeming grace.

Now, all you really need to convince yourself of the depth and seriousness of your sin is the cross of Jesus Christ. That God would go to the extent that he did to sacrifice his one and only Son ought to be demonstration enough that the moral tragedy of sin is real. It is so real that God’s real Son had to come in a real birth, live a real life of perfection, die a real death, and walk away from a real tomb so that you could have real forgiveness and real hope in the face of your real sin. When sin is real, real grace is the only hope!

For further study and encouragement: Psalm 32