Monday's Follow-up to Sunday's Message: Exposing Sins

Ephesians 5:14, “This is why it is said: ‘Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”

We sleep and slumber in the darkness.  The darkness dulls our senses—it’s hard to see things for what thy clearly are in the dark.  The darkness dulls our reason—it’s hard to think Biblically in the dark.  So we drift away, and the sweet, smooth empty words of the world take hold in our minds and, without thinking, we find ourselves deceived.

No!

It doesn’t have to be that way!  The light of Christ illuminates your darkness.  It disperses your mental fog and lets you think clearly once again.

“Everything exposed by the light becomes visible.”  Confessing your sins—your specific sins—is like dragging those sins into the light: they become visible.  That troubles us, because we’d rather hide our imperfections away.  We’d rather put on a good face, a brave face, for the world to see.  After all, will the world ever listen to us if we honestly admit we sin?  That we religious, church-going, Bible-reading people have actual, real, ugly, damning, personal sin?

It’s natural to fear confession . . . but the cure to fear is faith.  Faith that the light of Christ is the only thing that can overcome your darkness.  Faith that dragging your sins into the light—exposing them!—will kill off your old sinful nature.    

Faith that Christ will be true to His promise and give you His life and light in return for your darkness and death. 

It’s time to stop pretending we’re the righteous, and time to start telling people we’re the redeemed.  No longer hiding our sins, but having them exposed for what they really are. 

“Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” 

"And this is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we depend not on our own strength, conscience, mind, person, or works but on what is outside us, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive." -Martin Luther

Monday's Follow-up to Sunday's Message: Action! . . . or not?

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;  to be made new in the attitude of your minds;  and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.  Ephesians 4:22-24  

When we talk about the kind of person we’d like to be, we almost always talk about actions.  Things that we think we should be doing.  New habits that we believe we should be incorporating into our lives.  New skills we want to acquire. 

And on the days when we decide we’d like to be a better Christian, we naturally tend to think of specific actions that Christians should do.  So when we read a list like the list in Ephesians 4:25-32, we immediately want to stop doing some things and start doing others.  It’s all about the actions.

Now certainly there are actions that belong to the old, sinful self, and there are actions that belong to the new self.  Paul covers that very well in his list in Ephesians.  But the important thing to remember is that we don’t become better Christians by focusing upon ourselves and what we do.  Instead, I simply advise you to focus upon Christ.

The daily cycle of dying and rising—of daily drowning the Old Adam and having the New Man rise up—is a cycle of daily repentance and trust.  As such, the daily cycle of dying and rising would have us look to Christ—always to Christ—for His forgiveness, His indwelling Spirit, and His renewal. 

You see, when we focus upon actions, we’re really focusing upon ourselves.  And that’s too bad, because we will never have the power to change ourselves in the way we’d like.  Wouldn’t it be better to focus upon Christ?