Lies Women Believe About Sin, Part 5

Series: Lies Women Believe About Sin

Leslie Basham: It's easy to spot another's sinful behavior--but are you equally as good at identifying your own shortcomings? It's Friday, May 3; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss.

Have you ever found yourself saying, "Compared to so and so, I'm not so bad"? While making that comparison may have eased your mind, it didn't justify your sinfulness in the eyes of a Holy God. Today, Nancy will tell us what happens when we compare our sins to those of others. Let's join her now as she uses some examples of early Christians to show us what it means to fear the Lord.

Nancy DeMoss: When we think of the Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we think of men and women who were deeply spiritual. We probably don't think of them as being great sinners. They were men and women who had real hearts for God. But the interesting thing to me, as I read some of their writings, is that because these men and women had such a high view of God, they also saw themselves as great sinners, with a tremendous need for the mercy of God.

In some of the writings of the Puritans, I see a sense of the horror they had for their own sins. Even things that might seem insignificant to us, the Puritans considered very serious sins. This comes out in their prayers. For example, in one that I read recently, the author prayed, "Unmask to me sin's deformity, that I may hate it, abhor it, flee from it. Let me never forget that the heinousness of sin lies not so much in the nature of the sin committed, as in the greatness of the person sinned against." The fact that we have a Holy God is what makes our sins so serious.

We've been looking all week at lies women believe about sin. Yesterday and today, we've been focusing on the lie, "My sin isn't really that bad." The Bible tells us that the fear of the Lord is to hate evil. Now, I don't like evil. But one of the things God has been asking me as I've been preparing for this series is, "Do you really hate evil? Do you have a holy hatred toward anything that is not consistent with God's holiness?"

In Romans 12:9, the apostle Paul says that we are to "cleave to that which is good," and "abhor that which is evil." In other words, we are to have an intense hatred of and aversion to, everything evil.

Our culture doesn't exactly encourage this, does it! When you look at entertainment today and the way society views sin, you find that sin is trivialized. When you think about what entertains people today, you realize it's the things that are pure and holy that become laughing matters. That which is virtuous and chaste is scoffed at and scorned.

I'll tell you the place I want to come to in my life and that is, that I will dread sinning against God's holiness more than I will dread terminal illness or handling a wild, deadly snake. That's something I want to do. I don't want to play with that snake. I don't want a terminal illness. But I do want to come to the place where I will hate the thought of grieving the heart of God more than I will hate the thought of being destroyed in my earthly body by a wild animal or deadly disease.

It's interesting that in the Bible there are several lists of sins. Some are in the New Testament, and some are in the Old. When I went back to a number of those lists recently, something stood out to me. In Proverbs 6, there's a list of seven things God hates or seven abominations. These include sins like hands that shed innocent blood. That's a pretty serious sin--hands that just strangle the life out of an innocent person. Yet, in that same list God puts the sin of a proud look!

You know how we do it: we don't even have to say anything. A proud look is just a superior attitude or thought about ourselves. God puts that proud attitude in the category of sins He hates! In Matthew 15, Jesus talks about sins of murder and adultery and sexual immorality and theft--and some sins that cause me less discomfort. These include such sins as evil thoughts and slander or using one's tongue to say things about people that either are not true or are not edifying.

Why would God include these kinds of sins with things like murder, adultery, sexual immorality and theft? The apostle Paul does the same thing in Galatians 5 when he talks about sins of the flesh and the way the flesh manifests itself in our lives. He talks about sexual immorality, witchcraft and drunkenness. Well, those are not things I've ever really expressed in my life, not as others would see or know them. Yet, right in that list he also talks about sins I do know something about: discord; being contentious or argumentative; being envious of others' gifts, abilities, strengths or possessions; and selfish ambition.

Why do I do what I do? Is it to improve my self-image and what others will think of me?

The problem is that we tend to compare our sins and our lives with other people's. When we do this, we can always find someone we think is a bigger sinner than we are. Honestly, it makes us a little comfortable to think that our next-door neighbor or mate or child or parents might have some sins greater than ours. It gets us off the hook a little bit in our own minds, and we can begin to justify what we do.

I think of a conversation I had with a woman several years ago. Her husband was wrestling with some issues related to pornography, and she was distraught. She came to me when she learned he had been dabbling in such areas because she just could not fathom how it could be a snare to a man. That's because her mind doesn't work like his. She's not wired the way he is. She just could not get over the fact that this would be a difficulty or temptation for her husband.

As we talked, it came out that she was really feeling bitterness and unforgiveness toward her husband. So I told her that she would never be free until she came to see that her sins of bitterness and unforgiveness were as serious an offense against God as her husband's struggling with moral issues in his life.

Now, some sins do have broader ramifications and consequences in the natural realm; but until she came to see that she was a sinner desperately in need of God's mercy, she would not be able to extend the mercy her husband needed to help him be victorious in his moral battle.

I also talked recently with a woman who had come out of an abusive background. There were some huge father wounds and hurts in her life. She's now probably in her 50's, but she's looking back on those childhood experiences. She told me she has such hatred and anger and bitterness in her heart toward her earthly father that she can't get to God. She can't trust God. She can't surrender her life to God because of these sinful feelings.

The whole implication was that her dad had sinned against her greatly, which no doubt is true. But the other implication was that her sins of hatred and anger and bitterness are not as bad as his sins in whatever ways he had violated her as a little girl.

Since this was the first conversation I had had with her, I was really trying to hear her heart. As I listened, it became clear to me that this woman was not going to find redemption in Christ until she came to the realization that not only was her dad a sinner desperately in need of God's mercy; but that she, too, was a sinner desperately in need of God's mercy.

As long as we are trying to balance the scales of our guilt with someone else's more serious sin, we are going to try to justify our sin. We're not going to be set free from it as long as we are comparing our sins to those of other people and feeling that ours is not as bad as theirs. What looks clean in our lives when we compare ourselves with other sinners may look very different when we compare ourselves with the holiness of God.

I live in a house with white siding. At least, it looks white most of the year; and it's supposed to be white. But when the snow falls in the winter and it's really white everywhere around my house, all of a sudden that siding looks dingy and yellow. It doesn't look nearly as white when I see it compared with something that really is white.

I find that when I compare my life to other sinners I know--I can think I'm doing okay. But when I get into the presence of God and look into His holiness, my life looks different. If you and I want to see our lives as they really are, we need to get into the presence of God. We need to put our lives up next to the standard of the holiness and purity of God and stand there and say, "God, show me who I really am in Your light."

Leslie Basham: That's Nancy DeMoss teaching us about the holiness of God and the ugliness of sin. Nancy will be back in a minute with a final thought.

You know, if we believe lies about sin, what other lies are we believing? Nancy's book Lies Women Believe can shed some light on this topic. In it, she exposes some of the most common lies we believe about such things as ourselves, our children, our priorities and God. This book is available for a suggested donation of $17. To order a copy, just call us at 1-800-569-5959. Or visit our Web site ReviveOurHearts.com.

When you contact us, would you consider what you could give to help support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts? We rely on the financial support of our listeners, and your gift would help us continue reaching women in your area.

We hope you have a great weekend. Join us again on Monday when Nancy will continue to expose lies women believe about sin. Now to wrap things up, here's Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss: In Psalm 90:8, the psalmist said, "Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance." So we pray, "Oh God, would You show me who You are. And in that light, help me to be honest about who I really am. Help me to see what You see. Turn on the light."

It can be scary to say, "Lord, I want You to show me who You are, and I want You to turn the spotlight of Your holiness on my life." What am I going to see? What's going to get exposed when the light's turned on?

You may initially resist praying that kind of prayer, but let me say to you that it's so good to let the light shine into your heart and life! In the light of what you see--the sinfulness, the awfulness, the depth, the extensiveness of your sin--if God shines the light, it will put something very precious in the dark places of your heart. And that is the way of the cross. The light of His grace is the way of the cross. It will never seem to you to be precious until you've seen for yourself who you really are--and your sin as God sees it.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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