Psalm 25

To You, Yahweh, I lift up my soul.

O my God, I trust in You;

Let me not be ashamed;

Let not my enemies triumph over me.

Indeed, let no one who waits on You be ashamed;

Let those be ashamed who deal treacherously without cause.

Show me Your ways, Yahweh;

Teach me Your paths.

Lead me in Your truth and teach me,

For You are the God of my salvation;

On You I wait all the day.

Remember, Yahweh, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses,

For they are from of old.

Do not remember the sins of my youth,

nor my transgressions;

According to Your mercy remember me,

For Your goodness' sake, Yahweh.

Good and upright is Yahweh;

Therefore He teaches sinners in the way.

The humble He guides in justice,

and the humble He teaches His way.

All the paths of Yahweh are mercy and truth,

To such as kept His covenant and His testimonies.

For Your name's sake, Yahweh,

Pardon my iniquity, for it is great.

Who is the man that fears Yahweh?

Him shall He teach in the way He chooses.

He himself shall dwell in prosperity,

And his descendants shall inherit the earth.

The secret of Yahweh is with those who fear him,

And He will show them His covenant.

My eyes are ever toward Yahweh,

For He shall pluck my feet out of the net.

Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me,

For I am desolate and afflicted.

The troubles of my heart have enlarged;

Bring me out of my distresses!

Look on my affliction and my pain,

And forgive all my sins.

Consider my enemies, for they are many;

And they hate me with cruel hatred.

Keep my soul, and deliver me;

Let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in You.

Let integrity and uprightness preserve me,

For I wait for You.

Redeem Israel, O God,

Out of all their troubles!

And the lack thereof.

Ok, so this may not be as long as my normal posts due to my collegiate studies (or lack thereof). Hebrew's been feeling the need to kick my butt for the last few hours, but because of something that happened earlier today, I've just got to write right now.

Rewind.

I was sitting outside an SLC classroom today waiting for class time to get there and decided to respond to one of Ben's posts over at the Harmony Baptist Church Youth/College Ministry Facebook Group. I typed this big, exhaustive response and was pretty excited about it. And then the server reset and wiped the whole thing out and trashed everything I had written.

Boom goes the dynamite. I was a little ticked off.

So here I am now, back with a vengeance.

Basically if you haven't read Ben's post, this won't be read in the same context. You can find Ben's post here. Ben asks the question "are we responsible for our actions." In short response, yes we are, but I feel the need to add something to that.

There are two types of sin: sins of commission and sins of omission. Sins of commission are exactly what they sound like: they're sins that we commit. We're probably the most familiar with these. Sins of omission, however, like to kind of fly under the radar. They're sins that take place in our lives because of things we don't do. Check out what Jesus said:

"If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me;" (John 10:37)

So what comes next? What are the works of the Father? We're joint heirs with Jesus, right? Sons and daughters of God through the power of His blood? Then this applies to us, too. Check these out:

God stands in the congregation of the mighty;
He judges among the gods.
How long will you judge unjustly,
And show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Defend the poor and fatherless;
Do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy;
Free them from the hand of the wicked.

Psalm 82:1-4

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man observing his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. If anyone among you thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is useless. Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.

James 1:22-27

What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Depart in peace, be warmed and filled," but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith, and I have works." Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe- and tremble! But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness." And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only. Likewise, was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.

James 2:14-26

The guys at the BCM are doing a study called "Get Uncomfortable." This study is all about how we live out our faith in a world that is a consumerist pigsty. We root around all day in the trough worrying about ourselves first. It's even seeping into the church. A pastor is only as good as his last sermon, some places. Which church you go to can be seen as a status symbol. "How many projectors does so-and-so church have? Really? Well this church just built a brand-new youth building with stages for their 3 bands! Isn't that great?" We like to see just how many bible studies we can get into and just how much Jesus we can soak up without taking that same Jesus to a world that is outside our doors, within view of our steeples and dying. They're dying because we can't put down our Beth Moore or Louie Giglio books for a few minutes to go outside and tell them who Jesus is. Not that Beth Moore and Louie Giglio are bad, because they're not. I'm just using the popular names to make a point: the church has become just as consumerist and insider-oriented as the rest of the world, and I'm just as guilty as any other Christian for making it this way.

Follow my logic for a second. I'm as much of a grace person as I can be, and I love it that way. But look in John for a second: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." (John 1:14) He came full of grace and truth. Part of that truth was that the world was dead in sin, and dead people are pretty helpless. Only after imparting us grace through his sacrificial atonement for our sins on the Cross are we alive and capable of doing real good;in fact, not only capable of doing good, but INTENDED to do good (see Ephesians 2:10). We were created to do good works. We're not saved by them, but they ARE the natural next step following regeneration, as well as the evidence of that regeneration.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that If we don't do good things God won't love us. But I may just be saying that if we don't walk in those good works that He prepared beforehand that we might walk in them, we may not really be loving God. There are over 2000 verses in the Bible about taking care of the poor, needy, widowed, fatherless, and injured. We talk all the time about how once we're saved, God does a miraculous work in our heart by changing our desires. We no longer want to do evil because it's contrary to the nature of God. True, we war in our flesh between carnal things and spiritual things because our body is still fallen and subject to the curse, but the soul is regenerate and doesn't want to live that way anymore. But this is only talking about sins of commission...that's what we normally talk about. But what about our sins of omission? Isn't it just as sinful to NOT do something we know we should as it is to do something we know we shouldn't? We have to make war on that sin, too. Jesus changes our heart to not want to commit sin, but in the process our heart is made to want to do good. If we're not doing what Jesus has for us to do, then we're failing at our job.

Disclaimer: I am also super-convicted about this.

We're the hands and feet of Christ right? So can we stop getting in our little love-huddles and stop giving each other the unspoken "Jesus is an insider just like us!" hugs and get out there and share Him with the rest of the world? I heard once, and I really liked it, that most of the time we pray that we'll stay unless God tells us to go. Instead, we should go unless God makes it abundantly clear that we should stay. I'm guilty of sins of omission, the sins of not reaching out to the people I know that are dying and going to Hell, even though I know the answer to their problem. The answer is Jesus. The answer is His grace, love, and mercy. If I don't go and do what He has told me to do, then I'm like the Pharisee who stood on the temple mount "praying" for forever about the things he DIDN'T do and then left unjustified. I'm like the man who received a talent from his master and then buried it. Upon the masters return, he deemed that servant a wicked man and gave away his portion to another.

So I guess the point is this: Yes, we're responsible for our actions.

And the lack thereof.

Psalm 146

Psalm 146

Praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD, O my soul!
While I live I will praise the LORD;
I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Do not put your trust in princes,
Nor in a son of man, in whom there is no help.
His spirit departs, he returns to his earth;
In that very day his plans perish.

Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help,
whose hope is in the LORD his God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps truth forever,
who executes justice for the oppressed,
who gives food to the hungry.
The LORD gives freedom to the prisoners.

The LORD opens the eyes of the blind;
The LORD raises those who are bowed down;
The LORD loves the righteous.
The LORD watches over the strangers;
He relieves the fatherless and the widow;
But the way of the wicked He turns upside down.

The LORD shall reign forever-
Your God, O Zion, to all generations.

Praise the LORD!

Concordances are funny things, you know? If you've ever used one you know that they can be really useful. I was walking around this morning, and started thinking about freedom in Christ. It was all kind of downhill from there:

Freedom in Christ -> Freedom from what? = Sin -> How does Sin bind us? -> Guilt

And at guilt, it gets kind of complicated. See, here's the way it works. Before we had Jesus and His forgiveness, we were basically dead men and women walking. We were already condemned to Hell and were basically dangling by the thread of life hanging over the flames (thanks, Jonathan Edwards). That's basically exactly what it says in John 3:18b: "but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." Thankfully that's not the only half of that verse. The first half, John 3:18a, tells us what happens after Jesus yanks us out of that position: "He who believes in Him is not condemned." Simple enough, huh? Condemned vs. Innocent. Eternally, we have nothing to fear because the victory is already His.

But I doubt that there's a human being who knows Jesus on the planet that hasn't felt like sometimes, there are still chains. We know Jesus has forgiven us, right? So why do we feel this way?

I think we do it to ourselves.

Don't take this the wrong way; sin still has consequences. If you break a brother in Christ's trust, you can go to him and ask forgiveness, and he should give it to you. That's the Christlike thing to do. But that doesn't mean that he's going to trust you again. And depending on what happened, it may not even be right to expect him to without a long process of earning it again. Sin does have consequences. I'm just saying that I think sometimes we execute the sentence of those consequences on ourselves.

Maybe the consequences to certain sins are more of the same. Take idolatry for example. Devote enough of yourself to an idol, and if that idol gets taken away (which is in fact a MERCY of God) it feels like part of you gets taken away with it. At this point you have two choices: you can either return to the forgiveness, grace, and mercy of Jesus, or you can mourn the loss of the idol that was eating you alive. You can become fruitful again, or you can render yourself useless in terms of being usable by and teachable to God. If you choose the first choice, there may still be consequences, but God can help you deal with them and make a recovery. I would even venture to say the consequences may be far less if you take this route. If you take the second route though, the consequences tend to increase. In the idolatry example, this may take the shape of being mopey and lazy. Heck, I've been there. I skipped two days of classes last semester in what I now see as the mourning of the loss of an idol. This may, in the case of some people, result in idol substitution. Instead of returning to the love of Jesus, the person will cut down another tree and carve another idol for himself. We lock ourselves in this prison of sin, going back to the things that should repulse us, like a dog returning to his vomit.

The reason I say concordances are funny is that when I looked in the concordance in the back of my bible under the heading "freedom," I expected to find a lot of new testament verses. Instead, I found one section- in the old testament, no less: Psalm 146. Jesus brings freedom to the prisoners. If we put our trust in some other thing, like a person, then we're going to be disappointed. It doesn't matter how wise this person may be, this person will die. And when they die, their plans amount to nothing. Their wisdom amounts to nothing. Their followers will die just as they did. Jesus opens our eyes, heals our wounds, and though our bodies may die, He grants us eternal life and the promise of new bodies one day: bodies that will not age, decay, or get sick. Jesus wants good things for you, but if you lock yourself in the chains that you forge yourself, you won't be able to enjoy any of it.