Tag: sick

Having The Right Attitude About My Sin

Neal Pollard

I have read, studied, taught and preached Psalm 38 throughout the years, but reading it today I saw it from a different angle. What David says about his sin in this psalm reveals why he was a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). The common tendency of even good people is to deny, deflect, defend, and dispute their sins, and pride is the best explanation for such an unrighteous response. David, on the other hand, humbly admits and confesses his sins. As I study his inspired words, it convicts me to adopt the same attitude in my own heart when confronted with my sins. It also encourages me to examine my life to see if I am harboring and holding onto sin.

David shows me several attitudes I should possess regarding my sins.

My sin should make me sick (1-3). This is driven by knowing how God feels about my sin. Rebellious, impenitent sin draws God’s anger, wrath, and indignation (1,3). He punishes sin (2). So often, when I sin, I allow (force?) myself to forget how God sees sin. When I see it as He sees it, “there is no health in my bones because of my sin” (3b).

My sin should overwhelm me (4-8). Rather than rationalize, David owns what his sins are doing to him. They cover him (4), weigh him down (4), infect him (5), humble him (6), grieve him (6), hurt him (7), crush him (8), and trouble him (8). If I am so affected by my sins, how can I hang onto them? How often do I nurture, protect, enable, exalt, parade, and gloat over my sin? I read how God portrays such hardhearted, wholehearted participation in sin in passages like Romans 1:18-32 or Ephesians 4:17-19, and it makes me ask if my approach is more like David or like them. A proper confrontation with my sin should make me come undone, repulsed by it!

My sin should make me appreciate its cost (9-14). David sees the damage sin does to relationships, and it makes him abhor it. He certainly sees how it affects his relationship with God (9; Isaiah 59:1-2). He sees how it affects his relationship with himself (10; Psalm 51:1-13). He sees how it affects his relationship with loved ones (11; Romans 14:7). He sees how it affects his relationship with even his enemies (12). He also sees how sin reduces him, making him a shell of himself. He is like a deaf and mute man because of his sin (13-14). More than once, I have seen a person sacrifice every good and wholesome relationship in order to hold onto sin. But when I look at my own life, I need to honestly ask if I am hurting God, myself, and others by my sin.

My sin should drive me back to God (15-22). The longest single section of this psalm is devoted, not to the defeat of sin, but to the deliverer from sin. While some have let sin overwhelm and defeat them, David refused! Dramatically, he shifts his focus from his sin to his Sovereign! He appeals to the Lord (15-16). He acknowledges His power (15). He appreciates his weakness (17). He admits his iniquity (18). He asks for protection from sinners who are hurting him (19-20). He appeals to God for help and salvation (21-22). My greatest battles with sin have come when I have relied on myself to break free. While I have a part to play, how often I struggle because I have ignored the greatest, single weapon in the warfare with wickedness? I have a God who longs to forgive me (1 John 1:9), who will run to me when I come back to Him (Luke 15:20).

I hate that I will fight sin as long as I am in this body, but Psalm 38 is one of the countless resources God has given me to show me how to win. By maintaining a proper view of sin and its costs, I will do what David does. I will not stop until I have done everything in my power and God’s power to overcome it! That’s a healthy attitude toward sin! 

Books by the Pollards

A Tiny Spark Snail Mail Club (Kathy Pollard)

PLAGUE IN MADAGASCAR

Neal Pollard

It is hard to believe that bubonic plague could be a problem in any country in the 21st Century, but that is exactly the case in the African nation of Madagascar.  Helped mainly by extreme unsanitary conditions in that nation’s prisons, 20 people died from the plague there just in the first week of December. There were 256 cases and 60 deaths in 2012, and while that is nothing to compare to the 25 million deaths in Europe during the Middle Ages it is alarming.  Since inmates’ relatives visit those detained, the disease can leap the walls of confinement and become an epidemic throughout the impoverished country bereft of a good, organized public health system. Though 90% of the world’s plague cases have occurred in Madagascar and the D.R.C., there have been outbreaks in India, Indonesia and Algeria in the last decade or so and this summer Kyrgyzstan had its first plague case (and death) in 30 years.  While it seems like ancient history, the last global pandemic occurred just over 100 years ago ( (BBC Scotland, BBC Africa; Quartz).

Read any medieval chronicles of the black death and they seem like horror stories, compounded in those days by the people’s ignorance concerning how the disease spread.  But what was obvious was how swift, painful, and fatal it was.  The resilience of the disease is demonstrated in the fact that it can still be a story today, despite the development of antibiotics and sophisticated means of detecting and preventing it.

Sin is a spiritual disease that cannot be contained by geographical boundaries, technology, medicine, education, or any such potential preventative.  While its effects impact the unseen part of a person, its threat is eternally more great.  People who die with it untreated are lost forever.  There are ways to cope with the symptoms, but there is only one cure.  It is universally accessible and no one who seeks treatment will fail to have the cure.  If we can fathom ourselves, as Christians, and relay to the lost how terrible the sickness of sin really is, we will reach more people and lives will be saved!  Of all the Bible passages that speak of the matter, perhaps none is more impassioned than Paul’s words to Rome as he says, “For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God–through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.  There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 7:22-8:1).