In Denial?
Theme of the Week: Taking Sin Seriously
Monday, January 5, 2004
 1 of 1
Key Bible Verse: If we say we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and refusing to accept the truth (1 John 1:8). Bonus Reading:Romans 1:21-25
Imagine discovering a sore on your arm. You immediately apply an antiseptic and wait for healing. But what if the sore is the result of skin cancer? The surface treatment won't touch it. New lesions will appear and the cancer will continue to spread internally. The Bible teaches that just such a cancer is infecting our souls: sin. If we suffered from cancer, we'd do whatever was necessary to be healed of its ravages. So why do we hesitate to seek God's treatment for the spiritual cancer of sin?
Part of the answer lies in our culture's discomfort with directly acknowledging this destructive force. The fields of psychology and sociology, observes social critic Henry Fairlie, contend that "our faults are the result of some kind of mechanical failure, which has only to be diagnosed and understood for us to set it right." Psychologist Karl Menninger documented our collective loss of any sense of personal wrongdoing in Whatever Became of Sin? His book traces how the theological notion of sin became the legal idea of crime and then was relegated to the psychological category of sickness. Today sin is regarded as little more than a set of emotions fixed in our genes.
—James Emery White in Long Night's Journey into Day
My Response: What have I viewed as a problem to solve that's really a sin to confess?
Thought to Apply: In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer (German pastor and theologian)
Adapted from Long Night's Journey into Day (WaterBrook, 2002) by permission.
Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity. 1 of 1
Forgive me, my Savior, for my denial of, or my cavalier attitude toward, my sins that cost You Your life.
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