Sunday, December 19, 2021

God Can Change Your Heart---If You Want

The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about our hearts. Let us repeat that. The gospel of Jesus Christ is all about our hearts.

Now our hearts are prone to sin, to selfishness, to temptations, to wickedness. That's the human condition, the fallen, natural man. Here is the Good News. God can change that about us if we want him to.Yes, contrary to old Calvinist notions that seem to be so popular these days and pervading every Christian sect, there is something required of us if we wish God to change that proclivity to sin. What is required lies in our hearts. We have to truly and sincerely recognize and hate our sinfulness and give it up to God from the depths of our hearts. We have to want our heart wrenched away from sin and changed. It can be the greatest battle one fights out, all privately, within his own consciousness.

If you miss this you miss the whole gospel of  Jesus Christ. And you also give permission to sin and to love whatever sin you like to yourself and everyone else. You have made God over to suit that sin. You have made yourself a false god.

It's like the man with the red lizard (representing a favorite sin) on his shoulder in C. S. Lewis's book, The Great Divorce.  The angelic being says to the man that if he would like to go to where God is all he has to do is just say okay, take it off my shoulder, that's all he has to say and then the angel will take away the lizard, do the dirty work, destroy it forever. But the man has a terrible time saying that. He finds it extremely painful and difficult to tell the angel yes, take away the lizard. It is the most wrenchingly impossible-feeling thing for him to do. He has gotten used to the lizard on his shoulder running his life. He has grown dependent on it. He has been getting something he wants from it. It is his false idol, his god. He knows it would be good to let it go, but he doesn't really want to let the angel destroy it. He identifies with it. He worships it. He serves it. (We won't spoil what happened. Read the book if you want to know in the end what the man decided to do. )

God won't take away what we won't let him take away. He won't destroy our false gods unless we offer them to him. There is a sacrifice involved, not of blood, like in the Old Testament, but of the inmost heart. It's much harder than sacrificing an animal on an altar. But it's possible and it's real. 

Many people today choose a certain sin, formerly and still Biblically clearly a sin, and decide God wills them to this temptation permanently. And if God wills it, it must be right. This is the case with homosexualism. They insist it is who they or other people are. They further insist that this condition can peacefully co-exist with the worship of God, the God of the Bible. They are simply wrong. 

C. S. Lewis, who lived in a day not too long ago when homosexuality was considered unspeakably depraved, said that if a person has that proclivity he must resist it, even if it persists all his life. Times have changed. Today, homosexuality is accepted, encouraged, celebrated. We know that what is encouraged increases. It has increased and is increasing, expanding, growing more and more preposterous and absurd. The confusing of the two sexes is now all over the place---males are accepted as female athletes, women are accepted as males able to have babies, male sexual criminals saying they are women so they can be incarcerated with women, taxpayer funds being used for "sex transition" surgeries---all of the above for which we have radical feminism and gay marriage to thank. (Yes, radical feminism and homosexualism are all about confusing the two sexes, pretending they are interchangeable. Now suddenly proponents of radical feminism and homosexualism are miffed at the transgender movement, the T in LGBT,  because without the distinction between the two sexes, all their claims and arguments melt away. If they are intellectually honest they will see transgenderism is just an in-your-face form of their own ideologies.) Sure, some form of this depravity has always been around. But the difference now is that while previously this out-of-bounds lust and conflation, was considered depraved, it is now considered decent. Evil is now called good. 

As such, Christians bend over backwards trying to rationalize this sexual temptation. Yes, they say, we can worship God and homosexualism at the same time. It's just the way people are. It's how God made them. It's cruel to put them through such wrenching pain and difficulty, asking them to give it up, even to give it up to God. Really?

Don't we all have something we have to give up to God continually? And those of us who have been truly born again, don't we continually do that? If it isn't one sin, it's another. Some sins we get rid of permanently, like the bank robber who pays his debt to society and never robs another bank, or the alcoholic who permanently quits drinking. Others sins, like irritableness or selfishness or lack of faith in Christ, these may keep popping up. The difference in the false and true Christian is that the false Christian identifies with his sin, he likes that red lizard on his shoulder, he doesn't go before God on his knees and open his hands and beg God to take that proclivity away. Not really. Not truly. Not to the end. No, people who come to the point where they publicly identify themselves as gay have not given God permission to destroy that lizard. If they had, they would never announce their sin to the world as who they are. Does a closet adulterer-at-heart announce to the world that is who he is? No. The truly repentant Christian resists his sins, he hates them, they are abhorrent to him. He continually falls on his knees and opens his hands and gives them up to Jesus. He does that as long as it takes, even if he is resisting and repenting of his heart-deep sinfulness on his deathbed. See the difference? It's a huge difference. It is all the difference between a true follower of Christ and a hypocrite and idolator.

Lots of  otherwise basically well-meaning people have developed this terrible, anti-Christ blind spot. They have been systematically brainwashed into homosexualism. They have bought into the LGBT identity thing, instead of admitting it's merely lust and bad behavior, like a pet red lizard which has been fashioned into a god above God. It's just another thing all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons have made an exception for and have actually put into the place of God, having stooped to love this thing more than they love God.

We know that no man can serve two masters because he will love the one and hate the other. It just isn't possible to hold on to your red lizard and worship God too. Which will you choose? It's up to you. And it all takes place in the deepest inner folds of your heart. 

Merry Christmas and Lord bless.

 

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