Phil 2

I know that it is odd for my first post, but it is something that God has really spoken to me about lately. I do not think I really appreciated how the little sins in my life impacted my walk with God. Here is a passage that particularly impacted me along these lines:

“Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened,
That it cannot save;
Nor His ear heavy,
That it cannot hear.
But your iniquities have separated you from your God;
And your sins have hidden His face from you,
So that He will not hear.
For your hands are defiled with blood,
And your fingers with iniquity;
Your lips have spoken lies,
Your tongue has muttered perversity.

No one calls for justice,
Nor does any plead for truth.
They trust in empty words and speak lies;
They conceive evil and bring forth iniquity.
They hatch vipers’ eggs and weave the spider’s web;
He who eats of their eggs dies,
And from that which is crushed a viper breaks out.” Isaiah 59:1-5 (NKJV)

This passage struck me for three reasons. First, sin cuts us off from the activity of God in our lives. God’s hand is able to save and his ear is able to ear, but the reason why He did not save was because of sin. The text says that “your sins have hidden His face from you.”

Second, the people to whom these verses are addressed do not realize that the sin in their lives is having the effect of cutting off the saving hand and listening ear of God. Sin has the capacity not just to separate us from our God but also to delude us into thinking that our sin is not having that much impact in our relationship with God. We always seem to assume, when we sin, that we will be able to assess our condition as well after the sin as before. But sin has a great deluding affect on our minds.

Third, there is sort of the assumption that God ordinarily is highly active in our lives. Our God desires to save and to hear. Thus, the conspicuous absence of God’s activity can be a pretty good indicator of when we are sinning. This is not to say that if God does not answer this prayer or that prayer that some sin is causing God not to answer the prayer. But if God’s activity of shaping, forming and delivering a person is simply not present in his or her life, then that may in fact be evidence of sin.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.