When the weight of your sin weighs you down Counseling Solutions |  |
| When the weight of your sin weighs you down Posted: 10 Oct 2011 09:05 PM PDT 
He is not bragging about it, but he is self-loathing. He hates his sin. He is ashamed of what he did to his wife Gerald told me that he would do anything to change the past. On his ride to work, his mind is flooded with the heinousness of his actions. His embarrassment and shame levels are off the charts. One of the things he wanted from me was to make sure I never said anything about what we talked about to anyone. This was his condition for talking at all. He even said that he thought about killing himself, as a way to be free from what he did. It was only a passing thought that he had no real desire to pursue, but it was a thought nonetheless. You’re punishing the wrong guyThe problem with Gerald, though there are many, is that he is punishing the wrong guy. Somewhere in his Christian upbringing and theological training in seminary, he completely missed the Gospel. Though he knows that Christ died for his sins, he does not practically apply that truth to his life. When the real rubber hits the real road, something is amiss. The Gospel does not transform his heart, thinking, or his life. Christ took on Gerald’s punishment. This was the whole point of His coming: to takeaway the sins of the world (Luke 19:10). If you placed a theological exam before Gerald and asked him some of these basic and fundamental cross-centered questions, that any Christian should be able to answer, he would ace the exam. He understands the Gospel, especially in a salvific way. Ask him. He will say, “Christ died for my sins.” But when it comes to his practical, functional, everyday life, he is a cross-centered failure. Why is this? This is what I want to explore with our friend Gerald. Why can’t he live daily in the goodness and freedom that the Gospel holds out to all of us? The Gospel loudly proclaims that there is NO MORE CONDEMNATION. Sadly, this is not true for Gerald. He heaps condemnation on himself by the minute.
I underlined this great text to the Christians in Rome the statements that speak of the Gospel. Notice how Paul’s answer to these Christians is always rooted in the Gospel.
If Gerald understood the Gospel, he would be free from the daily condemnation of past sin. High view of himselfIf you listen to Gerald closely and ask him specific questions, you will pick up on a pattern in his thinking. For example, there are certain people that he does not like. Gerald is a modern day bigot. God has blessed him in a certain way, but rather than giving glory to God and humbly receiving God’s blessing, Gerald somehow has forgotten what Paul told us:
One of Gerald’s gifts from God is a higher than average IQ. He’s a smart dude. God has given him a brain that works differently than the most of us, particularly me. He’s smart. I’m not. But rather than praising God for this gift, he is condescending, arrogant, and entitled. Gerald does not like “dumb people,” as he calls them. Though it would be rare for him to say this out loud, he has slipped up a time or two and let his guard down. Actually, he did not say he did not like dumb people, but talked about how he felt being around people who were not as smart as he was. He also shared about when he was a kid and how he was not as athletic as some of his friends. He felt inferior to them. It was during that time that he learned he was smart and he began using his God-given intelligence as a manipulative weapon to elevate himself above others. He could not out hit or out run his friends, but he could out smart them. Unfortunately, his parents never discerned this darkness in his heart. Actually they were lousy parents and in some ways Gerald was left to fend for himself. From his ungodly perspective it made sense to sharpen his intellectual weapon and stand up for himself. He became arrogant.His craving to feel good about himself, or to feel better than others through his intellectual prowess, led him into the world of academia. While other kids did exactly the same thing that Gerald did, but through sports, Gerald’s self-worship took an intellectual route. His idolatry also led him into $100k in school debt. As has been said too often,
Gerald’s craving to feel superior led him headlong into a trap (Galatians 6:1-2). This desire to feed his idol has also left a trail of broken relationships in his life. In addition to looking down on “dumb people,” he also looks down on other people groups. When he finally became honest, he said he did not like, and I quote:
His search for significance led him to many people groups that he could feel superior to. Once he found what he deemed as inferior people he proceeded to feel smug about his superiority. He would even reach out to some of these people groups, like a king letting the lowly kiss his ring. When the king loses his crownYou can imagine the humiliation of the king when his wife found out about his habituated porn addiction that had been going on for over two decades. The king was now living among the commoners. This was devastating to Gerald. This is also why he could not extricate himself from his sin and the accompanying condemnation. When you’re the king of the world, at least in your own mind, it is hard to accept the reality that you’re just like the rest of us. The word Adam means “man of the earth.” Adam was kicked up from the dust of the earth and God breathed into him and man became animated. You and I are highly sophisticated dirt clods that God is mercifully allowing to live, breathe, and express ourselves on His earth. It is when we forget this that we are in trouble. Gerald forgot that he is not somebody, but a nobody.[1] I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog.[2]He ran off the theological tracks way back in his childhood, assuming he was ever on them, and began to think he was somebody as he sought and fought for superiority through the gifts that God gave him. In the end, Gerald is just like the rest of us, a nobody apart from the grace of God in our lives. When his sin was found out, he was devastated. The higher up you are, or think you are, or wish you were, the harder the fall when exposed. Gerald had been striving all his life to be somebody and now he is having a difficult time accepting the fact that he is a sinner like the rest of us. He is a Gospel-dysfunctional being. Gospel motivated sanctification In addition to Gerald’s bigoted arrogance, he also has a skewed view of the Gospel. He is fully aware that the Gospel is capable of saving a person, but he has not clearly heard how the Gospel is also the essential need for his sanctification. He saw the Gospel as the ticket to get into the kingdom, and rightly so, but after his entrance into the kingdom he leaned into his personal strengths and attributes as his primary source to “stay right with God.” With that kind of twisted theology functioning at the core of his heart, it made sense that when he sinned hard and repeatedly, that he would be devastated.
When I initially brought this up to him, he denied it and did what any sound thinking Christian would do: he quoted Ephesians 2:8-9: For by grace you are saved…not of works…. While I had no doubts that he understood Paul’s text to the Ephesians, the truth about his functional theology was that he did not practice what he knew in his head. In essence, he was functioning as an unbelieving believer. That is why he could not shake himself from his sin. He would not freely accept Christ’s forgiveness. It is very hard for a self-sufficient, self-reliant, bigoted man, who has carved out his own life, his own way, to accept a “hand out.” …even if the “hand out” is from God Himself through the death of His Son on the cross. Insecurity breeds self-condemnationThus far we have covered Gerald’s high view of himself and his lack of understanding the Gospel as it pertains to his daily sanctification. The last culprit that feeds into his self-condemning and self-loathing is his insecurity. Gerald is an insecure man. Quite frankly, he wants to be more than he knows himself to be and he wants his reputation to be more than what it is. As a kid he built up his “bigness” but flaunting his intelligence. Though he could not succeed on the athletic field, he soon found respite in academia. This put him on the track of self-reliance, just like his athletic buddies. This self-reliant methodology fed right into his Christian experience. Because he was “smart,” it was easy for him to excel in Christian circles. And he did. He was well on his way to becoming somebody. However, if you look closely and carefully underneath his facade, you will see a wee little man, motivated by fear. He built his entire kingdom on the false foundation of self-reliance, which is always motivated by fear. But God…God, in His extravagant mercy to Gerald, allowed him to go so far and then He said, “No more.” Gerald was caught in the devices of his own making and his world fell apart. But God is the One who is operating in Gerald’s sin. Gerald needs to understand this. He needs to be blessed by this truth. If you’re going to sin, then you need to know that God is there, working, devising, planning, and rescuing. He will not leave you, even in your sin. Only God can use sin sinlessly, as the cross implies, and He is working deep in Gerald’s sinful heart.
The amazing truth is that Gerald is not all that worried about his sin. Let me restate that: he is worried about his sin, but mainly from the perspective of how it makes him look to his wife, kids, family, and friends. He is exhibiting a false humility by talking about his sin and it has all the sounds and smells of Christianity. But the clue is that he is not living in the freedom and the power that God holds out through the Gospel. While the Gospel leads to freedom and forgiveness, self-focused insecurity leads to a fixation on condemnation. Gerald is not concerned about his sin from a biblical perspective. If he were, then he would be talking about God and His grace and mercy. Contrariwise, Gerald talks more about what he did and how embarrassed he is and how the weight of it all is pressing down on him and that is a big clue as to his functional understanding and application of the Gospel He is sin-centered rather than cross-centered. He is stuck. The self-reliant man who cannot extricate himself from his sin will soon become buried by his sin. What he is really worried about is losing all that he has accomplished. He is afraid of becoming the very thing he despises, a loser. What he will have to come to terms with, which the Gospel teaches us, is that we’re all losers. Christ did not come for winners, dear Martin Sheen. What Gerald believes to be a loss will be his greatest gain. If he will be dead honest with himself and come clean about the heinousness of his heart and allow the right people to speak into his life, then he will be free from his sin. I’m not talking so much about porn, which he must be free from, but I am talking about the greater sins of the heart that have led to porn: unbelief, fear, self-reliance, arrogance, control, boastfulness, and selfish ambition. Through the Gospel he can experience a freedom and power that his self-efforts could never come close to.
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