charles spurgeon says this...
By degrees men get familiar with sin. The ear in which the cannon has been booming will not notice slight sounds.
so what that says falls on deaf ears for so much of what we understand through our flesh. However, while i was sitting and reading this with the time to digest it a bit, i find that i have friends who fall into that category, not to mention myself as well. Friends are mentioned because of the obvious clarity of secondhand behaviour, entirely unlike the realization that the employment of such attitudes on my own part. Funny how we don't pay as much attention to our slidings until they begin to glare at us from the reflection of others.
The thing that sticks out to me more than anything is the words that proceed from our mouths. Matthew 12:34-37:~Offspring of vipers! How can you, being evil, speak good things? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. 35 A good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings out good things; and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings out evil things. 36 But I say to you that every idle word, whatever men may speak, they shall give account of it in the day of judgment. 37 For by your words you shall be justified, and by your words you shall be condemned. Jesus tells the "righteous" of that age that they are the offspring of snakes (allusion to the fall of man; a snake coaxed eve to eat the apple, much as they coaxed the Hebrew people of that age to eat the "fruit" of a spirit of religion which promises self justification) and that they cannot speak good things. The key to what he said was not towards the "snakes" but to those of us whom the snakes will try to speak through the rest of history. A concept emerges; from the overflow of what's in your heart, you speak those things. If what is on your heart is good, then the words you speak are good, but otherwise the words you speak are evil.
I have realized a trend amongst the more "grace filled" spirit filled christians. They speak of the greater things in the more magnanimous moments, but in a more casual setting, they are less likely to seem so. From the "smaller" words that would perk the ears of a child to more drastic expletives that honestly make my heart hurt. Sounding so righteous in pointing these things out is a farce, because how often my heart speaks the same malice at far less provocation. The awareness of this folly can be viewed in one of two ways that i'm aware of. One, that the vice has always existed and only in a certain level of spiritual maturity does it become realized, the other is that it is just an attack of the enemy. The problem with the former is that had it always existed, in a lack of maturity that which was underneath would have revealed itself unhindered. So that leaves me with what would appear only the attack option. Then i remember that I have not spent the time that i did before with the Lord everyday. In fact the onslaught on my mind really began about that time. So it is really that the attack was there all along, but before, my mind was renewed everyday (romans 12). I must be with the Lord or the nature of the flesh seems to prevail even if it's limited to my thought life, because the word says that sin is in the mind. James 1:15 speaks of desire or lust conceiving and giving birth to sin, then warns us not to be fooled that only good things can come from the heart of God. How then could the mind of the spirit give us foul desires. They just as all other temptations are not of God.
The justification of "grace" will not hold water as a scapegoat for any of us. Later in James 1:26, the write warns that if any of us thinks that we are righteous, or religious in the pure sense, that we ought to bridle our tounge. I believe that no man is "released" to speak things that ought not be spoken by a lover of the Lord. I wish that the Lord would tell me when these things cross my heart "Do you kiss your God with that heart?" If proskuneo (worship) is greek for "to kiss towards" then how can we offer a worshipful heart to our father that has spoken out of malice so consistently? No worse though to offer the kiss of worship with lips that have spoken things unworthy of a saint.
The whole of creeping sin is above those threats that we think we should be keeping a watchful eye on. The decline of righteousness is the cancer that is eating at our society, and our "progressive church" at times breaches "progress" beyond that of the spirit of the Word of God.
I truly believe in excellence to our God, that as we offer our minds and our bodies, we should completely submit each to the desires of his heart. This and only this can guard us against any moral decline, or paradigm shift in callousness. I should only hope that i'm the only one who has difficulty with managing my time in this regard, but suspicion says no.
