I’m a Sinner?

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners–of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life. 1 Tim 1:15,16
  
Consider:
   
The Bible can sometimes have the effect like an earthquake in our lives.  One minute all is peace and calm.  Then we ponder the words of Scripture and suddenly we’re turned up side down.   The apostle Paul, in these two verses, starts off with a simple principle: Jesus came to save sinners.  Yes, I can accept that, no problem! 
   
“Of whom I am the worst”??????   To make it worse he repeats it: “me, the worst of sinners”.   Just a minute, we say, doesn’t he mean that in the past?   Well that wouldn’t lessen the impact, but anyway no, he means now, in the present.   Once a sinner, always a sinner! (Please note that doesn’t mean you have to sin, just that you still have the propensity to sin – and that you can give in to it or fight against it with God’s help.)
    
What is particularly upsetting to our sensibilities, is what we know of Paul as shown in the New Testament.  Before he encountered Christ on the Damascus road, he was a highly devout and fervent religious believer.   He had been a fervent Pharisee upholding God’s name, and whose daily behaviour was faultless (see Phil 3:5,6).   If he lived today he would go to church twice on Sundays, probably once or twice in the week, and be a pillar of the church and the community, a really good man.  Yet he denounces himself as a foremost sinner.  It gets worse: after he came to Christ, he travelled the world sharing the Gospel and establishing churches wherever he went. He wrote a number of letters that have become almost the backbone of Christian belief.  And he still declares himself to be a foremost sinner.  If he said that about himself, what would he say about us???
     
Why does he say this?  For the reason we indicated above.  He knows he was a sinner and is still a sinner.  He preaches against sin and he beats himself up to not sin, but he still knows his propensity.   Read Romans, chapter 7, if you are not clear about this.   It’s at the end of that chapter that he cries, “Who will rescue me… Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v.24,25).   He then goes on in the next chapter to explain how Christ does it – by his work on the Cross and the work of his Holy Spirit, but the truth is still there – without these two things, we’re doomed!  
   
For many people this is a sticking place which makes it difficult for them to go any further. To actually acknowledge that you ARE a sinner, someone with the propensity, given half a chance, to sin, is the starting place for any spiritual progress.   It is what these early Lent meditations are focused on, and what lies behind all the work of Christ on the Cross that we’ll examine later. There may be a number of things we’re hiding behind, and we’ll look at some of them soon, but the truth is still there – and we’re all like it – we are sinners, needing a Saviour!
    
There are perhaps two opposite extremes we should note before closing. There is the disreputable person who says, “Yes, I’m a sinner. I make no pretence about it. I know what I am – but then aren’t we all!” That person is happy or content with their sin and are not bothered by it. What they don’t understand is that they will be answerable to God for it and the day of accounting will be very painful and may stretch into eternity unless they find some ways to escape it. 
    
The opposite extreme is the nice person who goes to church regularly, may even be a pillar of the church and the local community. They sit on various committees to help the community or even, perhaps a charity. They see themselves as ‘good’. For them this talk about being a ’sinner’ is obnoxious. No, that is for the disreputable people you find in the red light district of town, but not me! Oh, yes,  says Paul, you too!
   
Prayer:
   
Lord, I’m beginning to see it.  Without your work and your Spirit I’m lost.  The propensity to sin is still there and I need you daily to deliver me from it.  Thank you for your salvation that does this.  Thank you that you have set me free so that I don’t have to sin – but I still recognise it lurking there.   
    

My Deceitful Heart

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?   Jer 17:9
   
Consider:
    
We are considering in these early meditations in this series, that the starting place for understanding Easter and the Cross, is seeing our own state and our need. When I see myself as I  truly am, then I will see my need, and when I understand the Cross, I will understand that is it God’s answer to my need.
      
Now the Bible says a lot about ‘the heart’.   Of course it doesn’t just mean that muscular valve that pumps the blood round our body.  Vines Expository Dictionary identifies ‘heart’ as meaning, the ‘inner man’ (Deut 30:14), and the seat of:
     
·         ‘desire or inclination’ (Ex 7:14),
·         the ‘emotions’ (Deut 6:5),
·         ‘knowledge and wisdom’ (Deut 8:5),
·         ‘conscience and moral character’ (Job 27:6),
·         ‘rebellion and pride’ (Gen 8:21). 
     
        Consider some of those for a moment: desire or inclination, emotions, knowledge and wisdom, conscience and moral character.  Do you trust these things?  Jeremiah said the heart is deceitful; we can’t trust these things!  Now consider these descriptions in the light of this verse, one by one.
     
Your desire or inclination is deceitful?  Of course!  Do you know why you want to move in a particular direction always?  No, the driving force is often way below the conscious level, and should it surface we realise our motivating force is not a good one! We may think our motivation is good, but when we genuinely see it, we realise that so often it is actually self-centred. We’re doing it for our own selfish benefit!
    
Your emotions are deceitful? Of course they are. Do we always know why we’re feeling what we’re feeling?  No, of course not!   Often they’re responding to deep-down issues we’re afraid to face. Do you sometimes feel churned up but don’t know why? Do you sometimes feel angry about a relational situation where you think the other person is wrong, but after a while you realise that it is you who are wrong, and that your anger was in fact, simply self-justification. Oh no, our emotions can definitely be deceitful!
  
Knowledge and wisdom?   You know and understand all things?  You know and understand what you feel, why you act?  You’re an unusual person, a unique person, if you always do.  No, we often act instinctively rather than out of knowledge, without thought rather than with consideration, and if we did consider what is happening, we might act very differently! We assess people and jump to conclusions, and then we find out some more about them and realise we were completely wrong with our assessment. Our knowledge was incomplete!
   
Conscience and moral character?   OK, maybe for most of the time this is all right, as long as we do keep letting conscience (and the Holy Spirit) check us.   But do you ever find yourself rationalising a course of behaviour, why it’s really all right?  That’s just you being tricky, deviously overcoming your conscience, so that the next time your conscience will allow that path to be followed without qualm.  Oh yes, conscience can be deceived and deceitful!
    
On a good day when we obey the word of God and the prompting of His Spirit, all may be well, but on the day when we trust our own inner motivations we’ll find our desires are haphazard, our emotions all over the place, unthinking or incomplete responses ruling, and conscience justifying.   No, we desperately need a Saviour to deliver us today and every day.  We are prime objects of these con-merchants! When Jeremiah said our ‘heart’ our inner drive, was deceitful, he was absolutely right!
     
Prayer:
    
Lord, I place no trust in my own desires or inclinations, I won’t let my emotions be the arbiter of truth, I confess my unthinking approach to life so often, and I ask for your Spirit to stir and challenge my conscience, that I may walk in your ways.  Please lead me and guide me today.  I cannot trust myself and so I want to trust you, indeed I trust you to save me from these deceptions.
   

Failing to be Good

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. Isa 64:6           
  
Consider:                
     
Between now and Easter Sunday we’ll be putting meditations on this page that pertain to Easter – why we need Easter and what happened. Because they are very much meditations about the most important issues of life, at the end of each one we will also provide a guide for prayer to help you focus on God and on what the meditation said.
    
The starting point for real understanding is always our own state outside of Christ. There are clues throughout Scripture that say we are in dire need of a Saviour.  The verse above is one of those clues.  In that chapter, Isaiah looked back to the time when Israel met God at Sinai, when they had entered into a relationship with the Lord.  They had been called to obey the Lord and follow His ways.  A reading of Deuteronomy, chapters 4 to 11, reveals Moses calling Israel, again and again, to obey the Lord when they go into the Promised Land, to learn His ways and live under His sovereignty – but they failed!  The purpose of the Law was to provide direction for Israel on how to live according to God’s design for humanity. When He called them to ‘obey’ it was simply a common sense thing that required them to conform to the design laid down by God. If they did ‘their own thing’ then they would get into a mess, both internally as a people, and externally in respect of surrounding warlike nations. As we said, they failed!
        
Isaiah, facing this failure, comes at the end of verse 5 to ask, “How can we be saved?”   Then comes our verse above as he accepts the situation.  Sins are moral dirt and they make us a dirty person.  Indeed even the apparently good things we do are the equivalent of dressing ourselves in rags and tatters, filthy, tainted rags at that! Isn’t that a bit extreme?  No, because as we’ll see when we progress through these meditations, even our best falls far short of ‘good’. We ‘fail’ at every turn, but are so often too blind to realise it. So that is the purpose of these early meditations, to help us face what we’re really like, to face our need of Jesus as our Saviour.  God’s intent in sending Jesus is to save us from the mess we get ourselves in.
   
The effect of our failures makes us want to shrivel up and these very sins condemn us so that we scurry away and hide (e.g. Gen 3:8).  Once we’ve become a Christian and received the forgiveness of God and the empowering of the Holy Spirit, our temptation is to forget what we were like. But the truth is that the past is still there, lurking, waiting to reveal us as we truly are outside Christ.   Sometimes the Lord allows trials to come our way that reveal our frailty, our weakness, and our tendency to failure without Christ’s presence and help. When the light of God’s love shines on our innermost being, we’re able to accept the truth that, left to ourselves, even our apparently good deeds have bad motivation.
    
We do things to appear good, to impress others. Moreover, if we can face the inner ‘me’, we find a host of bad thoughts just waiting to rise up given half a chance. We speak words of gossip that are only partly true and we view others with attitudes that are less than gracious.  Yes, left to ourselves we are definitely not nice people – but, as we said, perhaps it needs the experience of the love of Christ to help us face that truth.
    
When we are insecure, unsure of God’s love, we have this tendency to cover up and hide, like Adam and Eve when they first fell (Gen 3:8). This ‘hiding’ is expressed in denial. We deny that we are not ‘nice people’. Some may acknowledge that they are ‘not nice’ but will excuse it by saying, “Well, we’re all like this aren’t we!” as if that makes it all right. When we come to know the depth of God’s love for us, we realise that we can come out into the open and be honest about ourselves. The truth is, as we’ve said, even the things we think are good (righteous) are actually tainted with Sin; they’re not good, they’re born out of our self-centredness. The acceptance of this is a necessary prerequisite to understanding why Jesus had to come and die on the Cross at Calvary at what call Easter.          
    
Prayer:    
    
Lord, I’m not sure that I dare be as open as David and say, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.   See if there is any offensive way in me” (Psa 139:23,24), for I know the truth deep down, that without you, I’m not nice! Thank you for all your goodness that is open to me. Open my eyes (even more), to see the wonder of your salvation.