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[...] Worth Weeping For - We may hesitate to call sin, sin but as Kevin DeYoung shares something should be of greater concern to us than the discomfort that doing so brings. /* In Uncategorized [...]

I appreciate what you're saying here on a very personal level. I'm late in coming to believe the Doctrines of Grace, if in fact I have. I've tried to speak with my wife (a religious agnostic) about these things and she takes it as an affront. (Which I must admit it actually is-- a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense.) The cycle we've been through for years is, I'll get convicted of my sin and tell her what I think about our various areas of contention (e.g. Christ as only way to salvation, inspiration of scripture, Biblical vs. popular sexual morality), and we will fight and fight, until at some point I say "You know what, you're right, it's not that cut-and-dried"-- essentially apostatizing-- and try to convince myself I really feel that way so I don't have to hurt her feelings anymore.

Nothing anyone can do (other than pray for us); but this is just a shout-out to anyone else who recognizes himself in Kevin's words and agonizes over his or her inability to put God's glory and clear commandments ahead of a human relationship.

amen. Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. If only you (we) had paid attention to His commandments! Then our peace would have been like a river, and our righteousness like the waves of the sea (Titus 2:15;Isa 48:18)

The spirit of R-56 and this blog post:

When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you in forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you. Thus you shall treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them—the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites—just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God.

Paul: if you truly believe "[...]the spirit of Satan is the spirit of 'we vs. them'" as you suggest, you have a bigger problem than a disagreement with the author of this blog.
Each of the four passages presents a we vs. them dichotomy in which one group or individual is pursuing righteousness and the other group or individual is not pursuing righteousness.
If you are going to criticize Kevin for his logic at least have the intellectual consistency and fortitude to criticize God's Word in the same way.

There may be a misunderstanding about "them."
You write "They feel terrible because someone’s feelings might get hurt. They hang their heads low to know that sincere people disagree with them. They get wobbly in knees at the thought of offending the culture, their family, or their friends."
There seems to be a perception that those who may not agree with you about what the Bible calls sin, disagree because they are worried about hurting people's feelings, or because they are more beholden to the culture than to the Scriptures. Among folks I know who may differ with more conservative Christians, that's just not the case. Many differ precisely because of their reading of the Scriptures, not in spite of it.

Your argument sounds like a Limbaugh meme. It goes more or less like this: "We know we are right because we are clear-thinking and rational and sane and dedicated to strict standards of logic and consistency. We know they are wrong because they are muddy and feeling-based and driven by popular opinion and they (the lib'rulls) will say whatever they think to push their agenda down our throats."

Does it ever occur to you that people might have an honest difference of opinion? That people on the "other side" may say, as well as you do, "we know what the Bible says"?

Elaine Pagels likely doesn't get quoted much in these fora, and I disagree with tons of what she says, but I sense that she's onto something when she claims that the spirit of Satan is the spirit of "we vs. them". Positioning your argument in terms of "they", and then characterizing "their" positions negatively as, essentially, "emotional," (though I am trying to be careful to not characterize the post as subtly sexist, as traditionally the realm of emotion has been relegated to women, I do find it suggestive that you are also staunchly opposed to the ordination of women to office) participates in that divisive spirit.
This is more Galatians 5: 20 than 5:22, in my opinion.

Isn't our lack of truly hating sin a result of our not really knowing God? Is not the remedy a choice to spend time in His presence, meditating on his holiness and his beauty and his unfathomable love?

Only as we come to love righteousness because we love the God who is righteous, will we enter into what the Psalmist writes about. It is the Spirit's work. Only He can make us feel the seriousness of sin. He will do this, I believe, if we seek to encounter God each day in His word. Our current theological climate minimizes sin, preferring to focus on the results of sin that we all experience in this fallen world. We hear much about the hope of the new world where everything will be as it ought. But that is very different from mourning our own brokenness, our ingratitude, our fickleness, or sinning in the same ways over and over, our complete oblivion to what God has done to save us, what it cost the Father to deliver up the Son. Surely one has only to contemplate the Savior who "gave his back to the smiters, and his cheek to those who plucked out his beard" to begin to understand the cost of saving us from our sin. But unless it gets into our hearts, it will be be just so much orthodoxy. When it comes to the sins of others, we will then tread softly, with tears, conscious of our own sin.

This post reminds me of King Josiah, who obeyed God's law from a heart that was powerfully renewed, humbled and sanctified by the Spirit of God.

From II Kings 23:1 Then the king summoned all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem. 2 And the king went up to the Temple of the LORD with all the people of Judah and Jerusalem, along with the priests and the prophets—all the people from the least to the greatest. There the king read to them the entire Book of the Covenant that had been found in the LORD’s Temple. 3 The king took his place of authority beside the pillar and renewed the covenant in the LORD’s presence. He pledged to obey the LORD by keeping all his commands, laws, and decrees with all his heart and soul…

24 Josiah also got rid of the mediums and psychics, the household gods, the idols,[j] and every other kind of detestable practice, both in Jerusalem and throughout the land of Judah. He did this in obedience to the laws written in the scroll that Hilkiah the priest had found in the LORD’s Temple. 25 Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the LORD with all his heart and soul and strength, obeying all the laws of Moses. And there has never been a king like him since.

May each of us turn to the LORD with all of our heart and soul and strength, even today.

[...] DeYoung has written an article about dealing with sin. With all the sensitive emotions and wounded spirits in the church today, [...]

[...] Worth Weeping For - “We hate to see the tears of those who believe with all their might that a certain doctrine, practice, or sexual behavior is commended by Scripture when we know that Scripture does not….And yet, something should eat us up inside even more.” Share Print this entry [...]