Monday, March 26, 2012

Sin Epiphany

So I'm excited about the stage of life I'm in. I've been feeling the desire to grow and be refined in all areas of my life. It's really great and challenging and exhausting and wonderful.

One big thing I'm learning is about sin. I had always thought of sin being more of an action, an outward thing, a conscious decision. Lately I've been seeing how a lot of times my sinful actions can be traced back to a lie that I am believing either about God or myself. For example, my striving to be dependent on no one but myself may very well be traced back to a time when someone told me that I would always be weak and run to others with my problems. I can see how the rest of my life may have turned into some way of proving to him that isn't true; that I could handle problems and do things on my own. Independence in itself may not be a sin, but when it comes out of a root of determination to not need anything from anyone, even God, then I think it does become sinful.

I've used this strategy of discovering lies in other areas of my life, and what I've found is that there are a lot of other places that lies are inconspicuously hiding, motivating my thoughts and actions. This has been happening for so long, that these thoughts and actions happen basically naturally. This sin happens basically naturally. Sin is no longer an outward thing. It is a fight against the things I do naturally. (Woah.) This means that the fight against sin isn't really me against the world: it's me against me. It's me having the discernment to check my motivations and then the self control to train myself to replace lies with truth and then proceed from there.

It's hard.

But I like it.

But I'm not very good at it yet, but I'm guessing I'll get better with practice.

Btw, I picked up this way of thinking by taking Redemption Groups with Hope Community Church. So good. I highly recommend it. It'll change yo' life.

I have a lot more thoughts, but that's the end for now. There have been a lot of things brewing in my mind lately, but I want to steer clear of tl;dr. Besides.. one shouldn't blog much during the wee hours of the morning. Especially if one loses all types of filters around 11pm, and it is currently 2:30am.

More coming soon...