From J.E. Tada's More Precious than Silver
When I choose to commit some major or minor sin, I find it ends up holding a tight siege over me...God will not let me hibernate long in such a state. I'm soon pressured by His Holy Spirit to confess what He already knows. But get this: He doesn't merely send a blanket of grace to cover my sin. His forgiveness goes much deeper than a covering....it is God Himself, the God of Peace, who sanctifies me through and through.
I apologize a lot. For being cranky. Or being unable to do something. Now, the latter is nothing I can help. But my biting someone's head off I can help. I can make the choice to NOT be awful.
"Oh, but I am sick. I am in pain..it's ok."
Yeah, right. It is not ok. It irritates me when I am cruel in the slightest to the people who are caring the most for me...even those who have called to check on me probably have been snapped at.
Sure, it can be understandable if I am short tempered....if I say or do something that is not super wonderful...but I still work at being ever patient.
Many times when I speak out of turn, my spirit instantly turns to my brain and starts making a fuss. What did you say/do that for? I can try and ignore it......but I will be increasingly uncomfortable until I ask pardon. Oh, we sinful people....
I'm quick to practice containment in my own life---I corral those sins I think I can tame, fencing in small transgressions, putting boarders around my disobedience. "This far and no further," I will say to certain bad habits. Once my disobedience settles to a manageable level, like a low grade fever, I easily move to other, more pressing needs at work or with family. But it's never contained long. If God does not get His way with your sin, His mortal enemy, it will rear its ugly head at another time and in uglier ways. Out contained sins limit our effectiveness, kill our joy, and fool us into thinking we are gods that are able to manage our sin life quite nicely on our own. God won't have it. His enemy must be defeated. He loves you too much.
There is a book my family adores called "The Plague and I", about a woman with TB and her time in a TB ward...she talks in the book of the doctors and nurses pulling TB from patients who clutch at their TB as if it were a prized possession. NO! I WANT IT! Even though the disease is killing them, many patients did everything in their power to NOT be cured.
That's ridiculous we say....but even today, people don't follow the "rules" of medicine. How many of us have NOT finished an antibiotic course? How many people don't take their medication for bipolar disorder?
We like to cling to destruction. For some bizarre reason, we feel we are powerful when WE decide when to get over something, be it TB or sin. Oh dear, how foolish. We would rather slink around, hiding a sin, hoping no one finds it out than just admit that we have a sin, repent to God, and ask Him to help us stop. Nope. We'd rather be miserable, in the "power" of our destruction.
It must make God so sad...that we pick destruction. That we picked destruction generations ago. That shiny sin was better than He was. Thankfully, He is so kind and generous as to allow us to ask pardon---and He gives it! He helps us with the Holy Spirit to see that the sin we cling to, that we think we can handle all on our lonesome....we really can't. Not without His help. His reminding us that we don't really want to snap at our husband, or spend too much money, or hold a grudge against so and so for taking our parking spot at church last week....He shows us how silly and insignificant our petty, treasured sins are.
I don't know why we save them. These sins that we think we can handle. Maybe we are too ashamed to ask God's help, that we ought to be able to handle them. But we are of a sinful nature! We can't handle them, that's why He had to die for us in the first place!
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