Not only do we remain, in ourselves, sinners, when by His grace we are declared to be saints, but we tend to be, after being born again, repenting and being indwelt by the Spirit, the same kind of sinners we were before we were redeemed. While many believers celebrate specific instant and total victories over this temptation or that after coming to faith, most of us struggle now with what we struggled then with.
Paul in Romans 1 lays at humanity’s feet not just our universal sin nature, but our universal sin. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness. All of us. We deny, bury, rationalize, forget our sins. Oh we may be perfectly willing to confess what Scripture plainly teaches, that we are all sinners. There is, after all, none righteous, no, not one. It is, however, perfectly easy to admit to being a sinner. It is far more difficult to admit sins.
James tells us that God’s Word is like a mirror, showing us who, and what we ere. He also tells us, however, that we forget what we’ve seen in the mirror. We don’t like what we see. Whether it is through refusing to study God’s Word, or by refusing to sit under Biblical preaching, we all face the temptation to turn the mirror around, lest we remember how ugly we are.
We turn our Bibles not into mirrors but into microscopes, through which we can look down on others, tracking down eye splinters of our friends and family. We seek out ear tickling preachers, all the while grumbling about the ear tickling preachers down the interstate. We do everything but face what we are, everything but welcome instruction on what we’re getting wrong.
I know of what I speak. I can spend hours breaking down everything that’s wrong with Arminian theology. I can thunder prophetically against the sins of my brothers on the other side of the political aisle. I can write tomes on the moral laxity of the people in the tribes I don’t belong to. When, however, it comes to my own theological errors, my own sins, my own moral laxity I am curiously silent. Worse still, I seek to silence any who would point out my failures.
I recently wrote a friend who is not from my tribe that had his own scandal recently come out. I wanted, while most were piling on, to remind him of the gospel. I wrote,
“You have been given a great gift in this scandal, the cure for pride, standing, a low view of your need for His grace. Your sin, however, has not and cannot outdistance His grace.”
Facing our sins forces us to remember that it is His life, death and resurrection for us that is our only hope, but also that His life, death and resurrection is our sure and certain hope. Were my standing dependent on the real me, I have only despair. Because my standing is dependent on Him, I have only peace. First, let us face who we are. Last, let us see His face.