Can You Stop Being So Messy?
Reflections on Sin & the Grace of Conscience
I love silly songs, do you? One of my favorites comes from Veggie Tales with a tune about the fact that “We are pirates who don’t do anything. We just stay home and lie around.” As my kids aged one of my parenting wins was how silly I could be with them with singing, and I’d often make up silly songs off the cuff based on a familiar tune. One such tune was from The Fiddler on the Roof called “Matchmaker,” with the lyric “match-maker, match-maker find me a match…” I often changed the lyrics in order to audibly complain about a messy house as “mess-maker, mess-maker, clean up your mess!”
When it comes to being a sinner (which you are, in case that is news to you) means you make your own messes. Even though messes by others are at times hoisted upon us against our will, all humans, everywhere, and at all times, at times choose to sin. Sin is most simply anything contrary to the will of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and proclaimed and guarded by the faithful witness of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
The result of sinful behaviors is that there is always, in the wake of sin, some form of deformation or descent from God’s original plan as a natural consequence of choosing to sin. Choosing to live in a way that God does not will for you is by definition destructive of what is true, good, and beautiful. Although it is not the only way to read John 3:16 one way it can be read, that echoes my point, is “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever trusts in Him will not destroy themselves and others (one way to translate “perish”).
One of the great tasks of Christ’s Church is to train the consciences of her members to listen closely to the heart of God, to the indwelling Spirit of God, to the message of Scripture, and then to simply obey God. Conscience is a grace gift of God. A conscience that is well-trained by Scripture, is able to be one that is practically kept as a good conscience. From the givenness of a conscience, then, there is a second grace gift that God has given that we tend to sluff off, that is the gift of guilt.
Thursday I’ll reflect more on this idea, guilt as a gift, in particular how God speaks to us through our conscience, with guilt as a natural emotion that emanates from sin. And that God’s leadership motivation and acting in our lives at that moment is always towards our flourishing as the person He made us to be in the first place.