sermonette: Editing Our Sins

Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 17-Jul-93; Sermon #085Bs; 20 minutes

Description: (show)

Well, as the end of the month draws near every month, I become totally consumed in putting out the In Brief. First, we select which articles that we have received over the past several months, the ones we are going to put into this month's In Brief. Often we are able to put together a bit of a theme. I will let you get on a clue. This month it is going to be about gossip and spreading rumors about people and talking amongst the brethren, destroying people's credibility, that sort of thing. They all kind of link together.

But once I know which articles that we are going to use, I read them and I read them and I read them—and I reread them—it seems like dozens of times and I make corrections. I turn sentences around. I try to make paragraphs flow real well, trying my best not to change any of the meaning or really just the basic substance of what the person wrote, just trying to enhance it so it will come out in a very readable way, in a very interesting way, as I see it. Because I see myself as a reader of the magazine with enough power to make it readable for others.

So I go over these articles with the proverbial fine tooth comb. I spot misspellings and correct them. I rearrange sentences. I change verbs for greater emphasis. I look over the things like you would not believe. So when I finally get them into the form I want, I send them to Andy Benedetto and to my dad and they look over them, and they make their corrections and suggestions, and I get them back—and then I read them and I read them and I read them—and I reread them—and I make edits and I change them and do whatever I can to make them perfect. Then I put that final copy into our desktop publishing software and I scrutinize the articles again and again and again, and finally I print them and copy them for distribution.

But it never fails. Somebody who has not been involved in the process at all, the first time they look at the article, on the first page, they find an error; and I have already printed 75 copies and I am not going to stop because we have got to get it out that day; and they were not really even looking for it! When that happens, I really feel like crawling under a carpet. I feel about this big, but it is necessary because it helps me to understand that I am human too. And it is a very difficult thing to get something perfect.

I think this illustration fits our own spiritual circumstances in a very big way. And I will call it here, for the lack of a better term: "Can't see the forest-itis." We spend our entire Christian lives looking for sin and once we find it, we endeavor to overcome it. Sometimes, though, we are so close to the problem that we cannot see it. Our lifestyles, our ways of doing things have become ingrained. We do things habitually, without thinking about them, second nature. Some of our "beliefs" (and I put that in quotes), are dearly-held opinions set in the stone of our mind sometimes only because we have always thought that way. And since our conversion, we have never reanalyzed them in the light of God's Word. It is just the way we do things, just like I missed an easy-to-spot, at least for Mrs. Benedetto, errors in articles.

We, as a general rule, risk glaring flaws in our characters because we have gotten used to them. We are so close to the problem. I remember an illustration given by Aaron Dean in a sermonette that he gave in the Ambassador Auditorium. I think it was about 1985. His topic was, "Are we growing in character?" What he said was this (this is as close to the quote as I could remember):

How would you rate yourself against the world in say, morality? Are you 20% better than the world is? 50% better than the world is? If you charted your growth on a chart, would the line go up or would it go down? If you placed your line next to the line of the world and how their morality is going, how would you fare? Do you realize [now this is the important thing] that if you maintain a 20% or 50% or even a 99% better character than the world over a long period of time, you are actually going downhill, if the world is going downhill. Think of it this way, the world's line is going like this and you're staying a constant, let's say, 20% better than the world, you've just gone down in the same rate that they have gone down.

And I thought that was an interesting way to look at things because maybe the things you allowed yourself to watch on television has slipped over the years. Years ago, showing a woman's cleavage on television was very risqué. But in last year's prime time drama, "Civil Wars," nearly full nudity was aired on prime time television. And this is just an example of how we slip over time. It happens in other areas too because we get so close to the world, so close to our own shortcomings, to our own ingrained habits, we just become so used to living with our problems that we have become blind to them. Which is interesting when we think about what the Laodiceans are judged to have done. They have become blind, they become, like I said before, "it's just the way I am."

If you would turn to Jeremiah 17, we will look start looking at a few scriptures that have to do with this. This scripture will help us to get a running start into this. In verse 9, a very famous scripture, probably one that you may know by heart.

Jeremiah 17:9 "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"

What this says is that, as humans, we are so good at deceiving ourselves. We trick ourselves into believing we have overcome something. And as soon as we let our guard down, we fall into the same problem again.

As an example, James says our tongue is as uncontrollable as a wildfire. I picked this one out as an example because I know I have worked for years at curbing a very sarcastic and biting and cruel tongue. (Just ask Sharon.) And just when I think, "Wow, I've really got this thing licked," I cut someone down in jest. But is it really a jest or is it my way of trying to be superior to the person I just cut down? Probably the latter. Probably I am trying to vaunt myself. My mother's dad, my maternal grandfather, used to say, "Much truth is said in jest." And if you combine that with something that Jesus said, "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks," what you have is using humor to disguise what you really think about somebody else.

Let us go to Ecclesiastes and pick up another little principle here. Ecclesiastes 12. A lot of times we read verse 13, "Fear God and keep the commandments, for this is the whole duty of man." Let us look at the next one.

Ecclesiastes 12:14 For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether it is good or whether it is evil.

That is why we need to track down these hidden errors, these typos in our character, because God is going to judge us by them, whether we would admit them to ourselves or not. So rather than lying to ourselves, deceiving ourselves, we might might as well be honest and admit that we are wrong in certain areas and take action to turn ourselves around. We need to recognize in humility that we are not perfect. That is something I have to recognize as an editor, that I am not perfect and people will catch errors; that we all have sins that we have not figured it out. Probably because we have become blind to our own habitual, ingrown, ingrained ways of doing things.

Another verse, Psalm 90. This is a psalm of Moses. We are going to read one verse, verse 8, because one Person has not been blinded to our sins.

Psalm 90:8 You [speaking as a man to God] have set out our iniquities before You, our secret sins in the light of Your countenance.

God Himself has seen our sins. He says here that the light of His countenance reveals our secret sins, our secret faults, the things we have hidden deep down. But what does this mean? What I think it means is this: as God's Word is a lamp that guides our way so that we will not stumble, God's face, shining like the sun, reveals everything. In God's character none of our absence of character will go unrevealed. Nothing is hidden from His sight.

I would like to quickly read a verse from Hebrews 4. You do not have to turn there, I will just read to you what it says because I think it has an interesting point.

Hebrews 4:13 And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

Now, this is interesting because the Greek gives us a word picture that we really do not see in the English. And that is, God is wrestling with a man in this verse and God gets the man in a hold and the man cannot break from this hold. And what God does is He twists the man's head around so that the man has to look straight in His eye. You know, there was the mention in there that we are naked before Him. Well, you know, the Greeks wrestled naked. They did all their Olympic-type games naked. And it is just a word play; that God has gotten us into a hold and forced us to look Him straight in the face. And when we look Him in the face, we cannot hide anything from Him.

Back to the psalms, this time to Psalm 19. This is a psalm of David that he wrote comparing the heavens, the perfect creation of the heavens to the perfect creation of His law.

Psalm 19:12 Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults.

Here is the answer. We can ask God to reveal our secret sins to us so that we can work on overcoming them. Really, His forgiveness is wonderful, but really, what good is it if we cannot see them to eradicate them from our lives? We are just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again unless we can see our sins, and we can ask Him to reveal them to us. But I would caution here that we ask him to reveal them to us in mercy, and gently, in a way that we can bear, because sometimes what we ask for we get, and it may not be too pleasing to the ego to find all these hidden sins. And maybe it is something that He can broach to us gently, and that way we can truly repent of them.

You know, when that person found that error and after I thought about it for a while, I thought, yes, how can I correct an error in In Brief if no one brings it to my attention? In that sense, the person was acting like God. They brought it to my attention and I could then make a correction. I really hate it when someone tells me that I have left in a word that should have edited out or I have missed a misspelling, but it is necessary. And I think I need to know if I want to turn out a perfect magazine because that is my ultimate goal every time, to turn out a perfect magazine. And to do this, to see our errors, our secret sins, maybe all we need is a fresh perspective. Maybe that is why I called it, "can't see the forest-itis." We are so caught up in looking at it that we cannot see our particular sins.

I know that if I edit straight through, if I go through that whole process, I am more likely to miss an error than if I edit for a few days and then go do something radically different, something refreshing. And then after a day or so I go back and pick up where I left off, I am more likely to find many errors than if I just go straight through, because I get tired. My mind plays tricks on me and starts correcting the errors mentally, but it never registers that I just read right over them and it never really hits my conscious brain that there is an error there. I just become used to seeing it and so I miss it.

And I think that is part of the lesson for us spiritually. We all need to take a step back every once in a while and look at the whole forest, not just one particular tree. Or maybe the other way around. We need to look at one particular tree when we have been gazing at the whole forest for a long time. It works both ways.

Now we will go to David's psalm of repentance. Psalm 51. We will read about five or six verses from this. It says right in my Bible that this is the psalm of David when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. That is a pretty blatant sin, to take another man's wife, to commit adultery, even went so far as to have a child. The sin, the recognition of his sin was there before him. But if you go back to II Samuel 12, he did not realize that he was sinning, or if he did, he had gotten so used to it that Nathan had to say, "You are the man!" that has committed this great sin. So in a sense, David here had just begun to repent of a secret sin. It was one he had become blind to. I think this is interesting in light of where we are today as well.

Psalm 51:1-2 Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

Psalm 51:10-13 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and uphold me with Your generous Spirit. Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners shall be converted to You.

Now, why is finding our secret sins so important right now? You know that, as a church, we have taken on the daunting responsibility of trying to help prepare a bride for Christ when He returns. That Bride will help with the very great job of building the Kingdom of God here on earth after Christ's return. That is a tremendous responsibility to prepare for, something that all Christians at all times should be preparing to do.

But who knows what sort of witness God wants to do wants us to do as a group or as individuals before Christ returns? We do not know, we do not know what His will is for each of us individually, or even as a group. We are just waiting to see where the Cloud takes us.

But notice that David puts these things in a particular order. He asked God for forgiveness and mercy. The first thing he should have done. He then asked for repentance, for God to work with him in overcoming his faults, to renew in him a clean heart, and to give him a steadfast spirit, to restore him to salvation. But then he says, after he has done this, he will be prepared to teach sinners God's way. It was only after he had cleansed himself of that secret sin, which everybody knew about except David it seemed like, then he was ready to witness to the people for God. It was not until after he had recognized the fault and repented of it, that he was truly prepared to do what God wanted him to do.

I know many of us, myself included, earnestly desire to preach the gospel to those who have not heard it. It is just something we want to do. It is part of the commission. It may not be our specific commission right now, but it is something that we are definitely aiming for. We want to be ready to do it. And I think everyone to some degree or another wants to do it. But in the meantime, we are in the stage of preparing to do whatever work God calls us to do.

The great human editor of our lives and character is working diligently to fashion His people into His sons and daughters. Unlike me, He will not publish error-ridden articles. As co-editors with Him, it is our jobs to delete the errors, secret or not, from the pages of our lives.