Our problem comes as a result of denying the role of sin in our life.
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Excerpt from the sermon “A Dissection of Sin and What it Tells Us About God” by Pastor Mark Willey
Video Transcript:
Our problem comes as a result of denying the role of sin in our life.
Let me just try to play this out practically. Worry is a result of some danger being more central in your life than God. It’s bigger to you than God. You’re more in awe of a danger than you are of God’s power and presence. When you engage in self pity, you’re more in awe of some benefit you have lost than you are of God. When you yield to lust, you are more in awe of some visual stimulation than you are of God. When you are angry, you are more in awe of some offense done against you than you are in awe of God’s forgiveness of your offenses. When you are filled with guilt, you are more in awe of your failure than you are of God’s grace and his plans for bringing good from your failure.
Sin is our problem. It’s the root of all the struggles in our life. But sin is not so much looked at by God. As your acts, or your words, your failures, or your screw ups, but as betrayal. You’re turning away from Him as the true life giving fountain for your life. We’re looking to other broken cisterns, cheap substitutes, to give us what God wants to give to us.
So what does this tell us about God? What does it tell us about God that God’s primary metaphor of sin is adultery? That it is Going to other things, to other mistresses of, if you will, of, of a deity style. It tells me two things. It tells us that God takes sin seriously. He is holy. He’s set apart from sin.
He’s completely different. He’s never motivated by greed or maliciousness or vindictiveness. So what does that mean about how He views your sin? Well, it means He takes it seriously. But why? It is not ultimately because it’s an affront to Him.
But it is ultimately Because it is poison to you.
You may react, well, no, God cares most about his glory. I agree with that. God created us for his glory, to bring him glory.
But until you understand this reality of living with God, you won’t understand what I’m trying to say this morning. And this statement is this, God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in him. When that begins to, I remember when God, and John Piper is one, made that statement probably clearest to me, began to permeate my soul, and I began to think, wait, you mean God’s ultimate.
Pleasure is that and his design is that he would be glorified in my life, finding joy and satisfaction and contentment and my life purpose in him that that brings him more glory. And all the things I think, well, I’ll do this for God, or I’ll be this way for God. He says, no, Mark. The more you live, as Jared talked about last week, and embracing your brokenness, your need of me, your need of drinking at my cistern, the more you’re able to live.
to my glory. His glory and your joy somehow follow parallel tracks. And the more that we understand that reality of God, that yes, He is holy. He is the holy other, W H O L L Y. But He is also holy, H O L Y, different, set apart.
But in his holiness, the visual is not of God’s responding to your sin as a strict schoolmarm waiting to smack your hand with a ruler, but of a loving mother grieving over the destructive choices of her child. That’s one metaphor of a heavy hearted mother. Another one is this passage. It tells us that God loves sinners tenderly.
A grief stricken husband here whose wife betrays him in an adulterous affair. And he says, that’s what’s happened when you’ve turned from drinking at my spring and you turn to another cistern. He said, you’ve spurned my love. You’ve spurned what I want to give you. I have the real water.
And sin is betrayal. It’s spurning it. And he said, no, no. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll find it here. I’ll be the great one and find out the emptiness of living that way.
So how can we be healed because here we are in the desert and he’s saying to people, you know you got lots of stuff going on lots of struggles lots of emptiness lots of conflict in your life and Most of all you’ve got conflict in you and he says you’re never gonna really be okay When you’re drinking at the wrong water source You’re never really going to fill up the the drought that you feel inside the thirst that My life is not how it ought to be.
It doesn’t mean you won’t have overt struggles and conflicts. I’m not saying that at all. But what I’m saying is, that internal anger, that internal turmoil, that internal stuff. He says, you gotta drink at the right cistern. He says, I’ve got to be central. And he says, sin is not so much, you did this, and you didn’t do this.
No, it’s that you turn and so you turn to all different as all kinds of things you live out because of that But he says ultimately you’re just not drinking at the right place You’re not allowing me to be the center of your life How did Jesus Christ make you and how does he make you what you have been trying to make yourself all these years?
First of all, he gave his life for you He accepts you who is rejected that you could be accepted. There is not another religion like this on earth. All religions say, do this, fail, and you’re out. Jesus Christ says, fail, and I will die for you. I will be here for you, and I will never leave you.
Today, as we start January 24,
I think what God says to us is, turn away from these lover gods. Turn away from these other things you’re depending on, you’re obeying, you’re loving, and he says come to me Sin is not, you, you, you messed up, you did this, you, come on, come on You don’t really hear God speaking to your sin until you hear it in the voice of lament.
Until you hear it in the broken hearted mother who with, Augustine. His mother Monica would follow him around. At the time he was probably the most renowned philosopher in the world. He was just a brilliant, brilliant man. And he, and he probably slept with more women than anyone in his generation.
Every city, every place, he was into everything. And his mother would, would, would use her life savings and would follow him. and pray for him, plead with God for him. And eventually, when Augustine, Augustine was dramatically changed by the gospel of grace, he always pointed to his mother’s prayers. You don’t really see God until you see him in the mother’s heart of Monica, until you see the father looking at his prodigal and running out of his house.
Not a word of a rebuke rain, just. This is God. He is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him. He sees sin not ultimately as you didn’t get it right. He sees it as you turned from me. You spurned what I want to give to you. I mean, could there be any more powerful visual of God’s love than that the way He describes sin is adultery.
Adultery is pain. Adultery is loss. Adultery is rejection.
And all of that is sourced out of a partner who loves the person that has turned, turned from them. My greatest prayer for the people that are most close in my life, my greatest prayer for you as, as the church family that I am a part of,
is that you will find God the safest person in your life. You see that? The person you feel most comfortable with. The person you delight being with the most, because you know, I don’t know everything about God, hardly, but I know this. He’s crazy about me. When we begin to grasp that, we begin to say, Why in the world?
Would I choose this? Why in the world would I choose pornography? Why in the world would I choose these other addictive behaviors? I have this. I have him.
To me, that’s a bit of a dissection of sin, and I love what it shows me about God.