September 16, 2010
Make Him Out to be a Lier
Adam and Eve, Ananias and Sapphira, David and Bathsheba all have something in common…they tried to hide their stories and keep them from becoming public knowledge. An article, Lessons from PR Disasters (Toastmaster July 2010) says, “It’s natural human instinct to try to bury the worst parts of a story, thinking they won’t come out – but they almost always do. What you see time and time again in crisis situations is that the cost of not communicating quickly and admitting error up front far exceeds the cost of taking those steps.” I find it interesting that even those in the world recognize the need for quick confession, yet we believers keep mum hoping we won’t get exposed. John says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.” (1 Jn 1:9-10 NIV)
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3 comments:
Gail;
-----I believe He is faithful and just and forgives our sins which we confess to Him. The people we live amongst are not always forgiving. In fact, both personal experience and those we observe of others show this. Lack of forgiveness causes much more pressure to err further by not confessing also to the people whom we’ve effected. And that error causes more to confess to God. Surely we must be faithful in at least confessing to ourselves even this failure lest we risk greater damage from self-deception. Before we can hope to be at all right before God, we must confess to Him and ourselves all our failures we know plus the fact that we err in many ways we yet don’t know. Only then will we see our own position as having no place for being unforgiving towards others. This is the position of least pressure to stay mum.
-----Why? The pressure to stay mum comes from the ambition to avoid incurring the costs of exposure. Some of those costs are financial in nature. That pressure remains. But much of the costs are to the integrity of our characters. The first order of importance Jesus gave us regarding His Father’s forgiveness towards us was our forgiveness towards others. It is like gravity attracting only those objects having mass. If an object has no mass the gravity of another object will have no effect upon it, nor will it have any gravity of its own for attracting the other. The more mass an object has, the more attractive it will be. So, the gravitational attraction between objects is in the sameness of their having mass. Jesus presented us with a similar spiritual law regarding forgiveness. For there to be attraction between spiritual objects each must have the forgiving kind of mass. There becomes a clumping of all those who have a forgiving nature.
-----So, what does such a clumping have to do with the cost of exposure to our integrity of character? Forgiveness is a product of humility. Arrogance is the projection of one’s own viewpoints upon reality. Humility is the discovery of one’s own viewpoints from reality. Reality is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, some shorter than others, but all so much that everyone is in the same boat. The boat is far short enough of God’s glory to make insignificant any difference between anyone onboard it. Humility acknowledges that everyone’s character is beat up the same way by their own stunts. So any hope of character survival can only be supplied by the offering of forgiveness rather than the getting of it. For the greater mass of errors on the boat are the collection of everyone’s by far more than the many that I’ve pitched in too. That means my forgiveness of everyone becomes more important than anyone’s forgiveness of me. And whether or not others from whom we seek forgiveness have any mass of forgiveness for our attraction, the integrity of our characters is rebuilt by the forgiveness we receive from our Father. For that attraction between Him and us who forgive will eventually remove us from this boat, and only it can assure us that our characters are not of the boat. Therefore our character pressures are not of the boat. And that is why being forgiving relieves the pressure to stay mum.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
We just discussed this aspect of David and Bathsheba's story at a church group meeting last night.
There is only more sin and distance from God when we run away from Him instead of running to Him. And more and more people are hurt by our continued lack of repentance.
Would we be people who bring our sin into the light for healing and forgiveness.
Hi Jenni,
Thanks for giving us additional insight. I’m always amazed at the reinforcement of spiritual truths when our thoughts bump into one another.
Gail
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