The PT (Pain and Taste) of Sin

But He gives more grace. Therefore He says:

“God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

 Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

James 4:6-10

It hurts to expose your sin to God, but that is the only way to deal with it. 

Sin will either drive you away from God or cause you to draw near to Him. You can hold on to your sin with pride, asserting that your sin isn’t that bad—well not as bad as someone else’s—and it would be too humiliating to bring it before God. Or you can humble yourself, draw near to God and fall upon His grace. You can’t cleanse your hands or purify your heart by avoiding the only One who can wash and clean you. When you give up the short term joy and laughter and walk through the mourning, you allow God to enter and cleanse you. Exposing your sin to God requires you to humble yourself and mourn the weight of sin as you allow God to deal with your sin.

Running away from pain is easier but it leaves you lonely.

It is usually easier to avoid pain or at a minimum take a pain relief pill to hide your pain than to work through the pain necessary to heal. However, if you don’t deal with the cause of your pain, the wound often gets worse. And if you don’t see a specialist for your pain or deal with it now, you are often left to deal with the consequences of avoiding your pain by yourself. In the case of sin, sin is both the wound and the cause behind the wound and the only specialist for sin is God. Avoiding God because of your sin doesn’t make it go away, it only separates you from the sin specialist who can care for you.

Sin is like chocolate cake, you seldom eat just one bite.

One of the problems with sin is that it seldom remains in the same shape as it was when you first tasted it. What starts out as a small taste becomes an insatiable desire for the same sin in diverse forms. Since you don’t want to end up enslaved to sin, you begin by avoiding the temptation to taste the sin. If you know chocolate cake is going to send you into a diabetic coma, you avoid it at all costs. When you draw near to God as your sin specialist, you can change the things you desire to taste because He changes you.