Mind Meld of A Different Kind

WE'RE BACK! THAT MEANS MIKE HAS SETTLED INTO HIS HOME IN SILVER CREEK, NY SUFFICIENTLY TO BEGIN RETURNING TO A SEMBLANCE OF ROUTINE. WE'RE GOING TO FINISH OFF BOOK ONE OF THE PSALMS IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS, THEN TURN TO COLOSSI ANS.

PSALM 38 (Abridged)

A psalm of David, asking God to remember him.

O Lord, don’t rebuke me in your anger
or discipline me in your rage!
Your arrows have struck deep,
and your blows are crushing me.
Because of your anger, my whole body is sick;
my health is broken because of my sins.
My guilt overwhelms me—
it is a burden too heavy to bear.
My wounds fester and stink
because of my foolish sins.
I am bent over and racked with pain.
All day long I walk around filled with grief.
A raging fever burns within me,
and my health is broken.
I am exhausted and completely crushed.
My groans come from an anguished heart…
Do not abandon me, O Lord.
Do not stand at a distance, my God.
Come quickly to help me,
O Lord my savior.

Quarantined

When contagious diseases break out doctors are quick to isolate those who carry the disease from the rest of the population. With modern medicine, we have enjoyed the luxury of not dealing with widespread quarantines like our grandparents did.

When I am sick I become needy. I want everyone to wait on me and pay attention to me. (My wife says the bigger the man the bigger the baby when they are sick.) Most times, sickness invades our bodies because it can, not because we did something foolish. At times sickness comes as a result or consequence of our actions. (STD’s)

David would have related every sickness with some kind of sin in his life. He had no other good explanation of why he was sick. Today we hardly ever take into consideration sin as a cause of sickness. If we are sick it is a natural event not a spiritual event. I am not proposing we spiritualize everything and discount the natural world, however, it would behoove us to take sin more seriously. When we have known and unconfessed sin in our lives; when we are walking in an unrepentant spirit, we open ourselves to attack from Satan.

Sickness is one method Satan uses to wear us down, attack us, and try to destroy us. This is not to say if we possess a clean slate before God we will never be sick. But if refuse to confess and repent, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the enemy. (Like playing in the rain and wondering why we caught cold.)

God of mercy and grace, I confess before you my foolish sins and pray you forgive me. Protect me from the attacks of the enemy in every form, including sickness. - Dan Jones

Sinner and Saint

I come from, live in, and in significant ways, am shaped by a spiritual tradition that emphasizes victory over sin. I like that. It’s biblical. And I have committed my life fully to Jesus Christ and trust his Spirit to purify my to the point that I can confess, in any given moment, that I am free of disobeying any known command of God – free of any sin!

This is one of those moments. I am not sinning in any way right now. There is no command of God that I am failing to obey at this moment. To my knowledge, there is no sin of omission or commission in my life – at this moment. My heart is pure. My mind is clean. My actions are free of any wrongdoing. Of course, it’s 8AM and the whole day is ahead of me!

I thank God for moments like this. Trouble is, the more I come to know and understand Jesus, these moments seem further apart, rather than closer together. The fuller my understanding of God’s will for me grows, the opportunities to think and make choices contrary to that will proliferate! Frankly, there are moments and days, I feel far more like David in today’s psalm –overwhelming guilt−, than I do like the person who, in St. John’s language, is “cleansed from all unrighteousness!”

Ironically, the deeper my love and devotion to Jesus grows the more like David I feel. No, I’m not sick or depressed, but I ache over the ways I contribute to the brokenness of world around me through my unChristlikeness – my known deviation from God’s standard of righteousness. Perhaps this is not a bad thing. Perhaps there aught to be more of David’s experience among Christians. Perhaps then, rather than denying sin’s existence in our lives or dismissing the tragedy of its presence, we sinners would become phenomenally more saintly.

Do not stand at a distance, O God. Come quickly to help me. I press on to victory over sin, moment by moment, but the journey is long and the dangers, immediate. I rely on your deliverance again today – and your grace. Mike Leamon