Have you ever prayed to God to make your sins known to you? I have had mixed success with this prayer, which probably hinges on the spirit in which I have prayed. As my uncle once said, “Don’t pray for patience, because then God will send you circumstances to improve your patience!” So am I praying because I want to find out my sins or just because I should find out my sins.
“Keeping the Sabbath and the other nine commandments is a response to salvation—not a way to achieve it.” - George Knight
At some point, I began attending church because I WANTED to and not because I had to. I WANT God in my life, and I WANT Him to show me things that are inhibiting my relationship with Him. Sometimes we think of sins as being something on the outside, insert bad habit here. However, pride, in my opinion, is the most dangerous sin of all for several reasons. It was the sin that began all sins and it is one that is not outwardly evident to most people.
Today, I held, for about an hour, a vase of flowers I picked yesterday... in the mid afternoon heat... sweating up one side and down the other... had driven at minimum 30 minutes to even get to the picking place and then 45 min or so home... got rained on... bit by bugs... we had a good time. (But seriously we did have a pretty good time, good friends do a lot to improve situations and we'd been planning to go to this wild flower farm for over a year.)
So I brought this vase of hard earned flowers to put in place of the silk flowers we usually have in front of the pulpit. After the worship service was over and I went to collect the offering, I realized that because of the powerpoint screen the flowers had been hidden through the entire service. I was a bit miffed. I was upset mostly by the effort I spent in holding them steady for an hour’s drive for no purpose. In an effort to alleviate my sense of indignation I complained to at least two people about my folly in even bringing them. And then it hit me. WHY did I bring them in the first place? Was it so people would see them and praise me for bringing fresh flowers? Or was it to honor God? To bring into the church something beautiful that HE HAD MADE in the first place. Pride… hidden behind a little vase of flowers.
Matthew 7:13-14: “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
Sin often isn’t something that everyone can see. Pride… ingratitude… lack of love… these are sins of the heart that run deep and separate us from God. But praise be to God that if we have true faith in Him, He will continue His good work in us. If we ask Him, He will help us each day to move forward in our faith and how we grow living our lives in response to that faith.