2022-12-09 A Meditation on Mild Eruptions

“For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Ro 6:14 ESV)

Mild eruptions and patent falling away, kept warm by virtue of knowing “it ain’t that bad”; “Yes, son, I still love you; yes, daughter”; “See it’s just me inviting you to something a bit warmer”. All that fussed up law was making us robots, cold, pleading but self-denying, pleased for a season with our “track record”, but in the final outcome wishing God would just love us, would overlook, would see what we did in secret, for the countless time.

Do we “break”? Is our fast or our discipline susceptible to outright opposites thinking and opposites behavior? So we wonder, were it not for plain fear of the Almighty, if we had our secret room and our private life, what trouble would we finally get up to? When we are there, what self-pinching, self-abnegation, self-torment, self-humility, will carry us forth through yet another hour. For in our dreams, perhaps, we go down the path of “what if?”. In our stance at the captain’s helm of good ship “We”, “Us”, “Just me and my recognisance here”, we know the frustrated swelling up of sin that says, “Just ignore that good and salutary law”. So thus we may do, and thus we may stay warm, near not to Christ’s good deeds, but accepting of His mercy.

Oh, if only we could find the warmth without the transgression; if only we could dwell like we have for so many seasons, in absolute certainty that sin has already lost its power to tempt and to dissuade, to fade us into the unmannered and unrepentant background. We no longer fear that sin can make us self-hate and self-harm and cry out for relief; for we cry, not against a human enemy, but against the personal rebellion and fright. Against the person who, facing down an impossible dilemma, in frustrated gesture does “break”.

But sin has lost its power to condemn. We only laugh at the breakage, and go back to treasuring up for ourselves what routines and disciplines we long to abide by, what things we patently love, what things we allow to nourish and keep us fighting; today, for the sake of that candy mid-afternoon indulgence, we are rebooted and drawn nigh unto manifest Call: go, and forget so many sins; they have lost all power to condemn. Not just the candy, but… everything.