I have some time to myself and I wanted to read, but I also thought this would be a good time for me to reflect on what I’ve been learning. So here we go. God has blessed me so much in the last few weeks and He’s opened my eyes to some truths that were either good reminders or new lessons to meditate upon.
I hope this post doesn’t get too long…but it seems all of my posts get long. Maybe I should learn to be more concise but then again, I need to be elaborate if I’m going to get a point across. In any case, I digress.
One of the things I’ve been learning lately is the importance of preaching the gospel not just to others but to yourself. The daily reminder that we are redeemed by His blood on the cross is something to be thankful for and should spur us on to lead godly lives. And of course, redemption needs a target: sin. Friends, it’s time return to the basics and examine sin and why we so often fall back into it even after experiencing the wonderful forgiveness of our Lord. For those of you who struggle and fight for godliness, you know what I’m talking about. For those who ask God to “search my heart” just as David did, you know what I’m talking about. Just because we are washed clean by God’s grace and love doesn’t mean that we’ve attained perfection. In fact, we often find ourselves doing what we ought not do and not do what we ought to do. Paul knew what I’m talking about (or rather, I know what he’s talking about). So begins a cycle…of sin. What is this cycle of sin? Actaully, how did we even get there? And more importantly, how do we get out?!
Well, let’s look at a classic example of the corruption of sin. 1 Kings 11 outlines the sin of Solomon and his decline as the king of Israel. People often refer to David as the king with a whole heart for God and Solomon as the king with half a heart for God. I don’t believe this is accurate, as we are only hot or cold; Solomon ended his reign with no heart for God. How did Solomon, the wisest man to ever live, end up there? Wasn’t he supposed to know how to live life fully? I think he did, but in folly, he made one vital mistake along the way: he never confessed his sin.
The beginning of the cycle is slow accumulation of unconfessed sin. By this, I mean we acknowledge our shortcoming but choose to do nothing. If you read the first ten chapters of 1 Kings, you will see the ways Solomon deliberately sinned against the Lord. He knew the laws in Deuteronomy and what he had to live by and yet he chose to disobey. His acquired horses from foreign countries, accumulation of wealth, prioritizing the building of his own house before the Lord’s temple and interracial marriages are all breaches of the standard God set for him. And never once did it mention Solomon asking God to “create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me,” as his father David did in Psalm 51. And so it sat there undisturbed, rotting and perpetuating a cycle.
The first step of this cycle is the root of the problem. Sin creates a perversion of love. 1 Kings 11:1 tells us that Solomon loved his foreign wives with the same love (Hb. ‘ahab) as he loved the Lord. Solomon lost it here: the fundamental truth is that we cannot say we truly love God if we love something else with the same love that we love God. Loving God needs to be exclusive and unparalleled; He is jealous for us. But sin told him or rather tricked him into thinking that we can love things and God with the same love. And since we cannot serve two masters, Solomon was really serving himself. His desires were shifted towards self-gratification and a longing to please his wives (by building temples and Asherims) and not please God (by disobeying the first commandment). So let’s move from the root of the problem and onto the part I call the relapse.
In the relapse, sin creates a craving or dependency on temporal pleasures that ultimately result in dissatisfaction. From verse 3 of 1 Kings 11, we find out that Solomon had a lot of wives, and I mean a lot. Was this guy bored or what? Does he need that many? Most definitely not. What happened was most probably that the unresolved sin in his life began to create a craving for fulfillment in everything that was not God…and naturally he would find none, so he’d try to find it again and again in each new woman only to come up empty every time. Verse 2 of 1 Kings 11 also tells us that “Solomon clung to these [his wives] in love.” He clung. He was addicted. Again the root of the problem was that his idea of love had been perverted so that he saw no problem with loving himself and God equally. The natural outflow from this perversion is the relapse into sin to fulfill our desire of self-gratification. And this brings us to the result.
The result of unconfessed sin, a perversion of love and an addiction to self-gratification is spiritual insensitivity or blindness. Soon, as this cycle perpetuates, we become numb to the Holy Spirit’s conviction. 1 Kings 11:3-4 tells us that Solomon’s foreign wives turned his heart away from the Lord. The word “turn” is interesting because it’s the same “turn” we use for repentance signifying a 180-degree turn from our sin to obeying our loving Saviour. Solomon turned 180-degrees from seeing God in all His splendour and goodness to worshiping the dull and worthless gods of his many wives. It was as if his back was towards God, ignoring all of His commands and pleas to submit in humility and holiness. At this point, he was unlike his father David who knew the depravity of his own heart and his need to be pure and holy before God. And so, the result of the cycle of sin is that we are driven more deeply into spiritual numbness and the Holy Spirit’s voice begins to dwindle.
So that is how the cycle begins and perpetuates. But if in the end we’re insensitive to his Spirit…what hope is there? How will we ever break free? My answer to this is simple: God’s grace. During our moments of blindness, God still demonstrates His love for us by sending people to rebuke us or allowing us to hear the gospel again in some form or way. He hits us with truths and heals us of blindness. In other words, He continually reaches out to us and will stir our spirits time to time pleading for us to return to Him. Why? Because He is a jealous God. If it weren’t for His nature of unconditional love, I doubt we’d ever be free of spiritual numbness. So the next time you find yourself in a cycle of sin, be aware of the truth that God is still reaching, still pleading, still watching for you…because even if you are a long way off, like a father to his prodigal son, He will come running to embrace you and welcome you home.
