Spitting in the Face of the ALMIGHTY

Here's an excerpt from Will Walker's "The Kingdom of Couches"...

"I sin, which you know all too well by now, but I rarely say it. Sure, I admit that I sin because we are all sinners, blah blah blah. But it's more than that. My sin is tangible. It hurts people, people that I care about. I withhold good things from people. I blight the image of God. I'm not talking about the kind of hangnail sins we confess to each other these days. I'm trying to say that my sin, even more than I suspect, is the kind of gaping wound that makes you nauseous to look at.

Sometimes I find myself in the middle of lust or gossip or laziness, buying stuff to feel better or craving the approval of others, and I know it is wrong, wrong like vandalism and deception. Yet the urges that drive it, or at least the habits that perpetuate it keep pushing. They push so obstinately that I feel I've passed the point of no return, as if I'm obligated to it. In that moment I think it is just easier to stay the course, easier to satisfy the urge than to kill it. There is a certain kind of relief in giving up. At least its over. It's over. I can think clearly now. I confess it to God.

I don't always confess it. Sometimes I dismiss it as small, justify it, or lose it in the blur of the next activity. Sometimes I clean the kitchen or watch TV. Eventually I forget about it. What's in the past is in the past. I'm finished with it.

But IT is not finished with me. When gratified, sinful desire subsides, but it always comes back in familiar and mutated forms, strengthened by precedent. My heart gets harder and more disposed to the sin. Thus the sorrow of prevailing indulgence.

It's perplexing. In some ways I am growing and maturing and becoming who I think God wants me to be. Simultaneously sin is progressing and spreading in me like a cancer. It is somehow subtle and ferocious, a homicidal lull. Each singular act of sin is part of the scheme to harden me, to medicate the pain of cosmic adultery, to sing me quietly to sleep. I don't think enough about the real horror of what it means to sin, that I conceive with my sinful desires a lethal organism that is unleashed into the world around me, perpetuating pain and deception, working to undermine the activity of God among us. I do not consider the long-term effect on my soul, that I am becoming a slave to what I hate."


I was thinking of how I hate my sin, and how I hate myself whenever I give into that sin. I was trying to formulate words about it all when I came across this small section in Walker's book...coincidence? I think not! I could not have put it in any better wording than Walker has. It speaks exactly what I have been feeling lately and I wanted to share it with you all!

I have realized lately that I do not know or understand the monumental impact of my sin. Sin is always a reminder of how we blight the image of God, so I will pray that God will show me just how ugly my sin really is. That He would show me each time I give in I am only feeding a growing monster whose only interest is to devour me. In doing so, my view of my own sin will increase and my view of God's holiness/perfectness/greatness/mercy/love/GRACE will also increase.


1 John 1:9