Living In the Presence of God

The stuffy, warm, early morning air, very uncharacteristic for February, made the layers of blankets covering my body seem unbearably hot.  Pushing the blankets to the bottom of the bed, I tried to cool off and get a little more sleep.  The sun had just begun to peak over the horizon, when I felt my husband rustling under the covers next to me.  I must have dozed off for a few minutes, because the next thing I knew he was climbing back in bed saying, “I turned on the air conditioner for a few minutes to get the stuffiness out of the air.”  The welcomed coolness allowed me to snuggle under the covers for about thirty more minutes, when I awakened to the sounds of the shower running and the trailer song to the Dave Ramsey Show calling out its oh so familiar tune.  As I made my way to the sink to wash my face, my husband asked, “What is that horrible smell?  It reminds me of rotten eggs!”  He searched around the shower sniffing until he found the culprit: a sponge that had been left on the tile floor since the last time I attempted to clean it.  The sponge, completely covered in slime, immediately found its way to the trash can, where I escorted it out of the house.  A little embarrassed by the condition of the shower and the fact that I had not noticed, I quickly put “cleaning the shower” at the top of my to-do list for the morning. 

As I wiped the slime off the bottom of the shower door and scrubbed the mildew and soap scum off the walls of the shower, I began to contemplate the gross build up of sin that I had so easily ignored in my own life.  This week the Read Through the Bible in a Year program has led me through the passages in Leviticus that deal with the intricacies of the ceremonial sin offerings.  Reading through these passages, I have found a new appreciation for the seriousness of sin.  God made very strict rules regarding atonement for sin.  Yet, I so cavalierly deal with the sin in my own life, often explaining it away or ignoring it altogether.  I often think thoughts like, I would not have snapped if my husband had responded to me better.   I would have exhibited more patience if my children did not bicker all the time.  “I would have” and “if only” statements let the sin accumulate in my heart like the soap scum and slime on my shower walls, which hardens producing a self-righteous attitude.  If I could take time more regularly to clean the sin out of my own heart, recognizing my guilt and repenting, I will be in a much better place when I am confronted with other people’s sin.  1 John 1:8-10 hits me to the core:

I began to realize that it is so easy to fall into the trap of claiming to be without sin.  I am forgiven right?  What sin do I commit?  Yet as I search my heart, I realize that sin is lurking even on the surface of my feeble self-righteous heart.  As I attempt to live in God's presence, I am more aware that I am in need of daily confession to get rid of my self-righteous attitude, helping me to recognize my need of the Holy Spirit in my life to not only convict me of sin, but to help me grow in righteousness.  So, what can I do to remind me that I am a sinner saved by grace?  As I began to search through my memory banks, looking for a way to add confession to my daily life, I remembered an acrostic that my favorite high school Bible teacher encouraged us to pray through.  The ACTS acrostic, which stands for: A-adoration, C-confession, T-thanksgiving, and S-supplication might do.  Rethinking this model, I am struck by the fact that the majority of the time spent praying is focused on God rather than on what I want (supplication).  Adoration focuses on God’s wonderful attributes; confession focuses on God’s forgiveness; thanksgiving focuses on God’s blessings; and by the time I get to supplication my needs seem so small in comparison.  My hope is that praying through the ACTS model, I will see my need for a savior because instead of explaining my sin away, I will more easily recognize my dependency on my savior, exalting Him rather than feeling a need to exalt myself and my vain attempts at greatness. 

The brilliant fingers of the morning sun poking through the blinds onto the living room couch seemed to beckon me out onto the back porch.  I followed them through the French doors where the warmth of the sun met my face, and I breathed deeply of the crisp October air.  The sounds of morning birds singing, led my gaze to the trees lined with bright yellow leaves, which stood in stark contrast to the deep blue color of the fall sky.  This beautiful weather came as such a welcomed change to the dreary wet weather we had become accustomed to the week before.  Oh what a beautiful day, I thought as I scanned the backyard and noticed my girls poking around the dirt in my garden desperately searching for worms.  I had a hunch they were planning an afternoon at the neighbor’s pond fishing for the prized wide-mouthed bass.  As I stepped back inside, I noticed the voices of my teenage boys making calls and finalizing plans with their friends to hang out somewhere, anywhere.  I had already planned to brave the crowds at Wal-Mart in an attempt to refill the shelves of our pantry that had been licked clean of every crumb by our ravenous teenagers.  When they asked me for a ride to the park, I readily agreed.  After shuttling the boys to their destination and braving the crowds, I returned home with bags filled with groceries.  Walking into the kitchen, I found my husband sitting intently in front of the TV watching an action-packed, rather scary-sounding movie.  Now, I don’t generally enjoy watching scary movies, but since it is not very often that we have the house to ourselves, I decided to snuggle up to my husband and endure the scary parts of the movie so we could spend some time together.  This was a mistake!  The snuggling abruptly ended as the intense music alerted me to the danger of the zombie-like creatures who lurked in the shadows of the dark deserted building.  Will Smith and his dog only narrowly escaping their fangs.  I knew that if I continued to sit through the movie I am Legend, my dreams that night would be filled with nasty creatures.  So after only fifteen minutes of the movie, I made my way up the stairs and into the playroom, where I shut the door tightly behind me.  I could still hear the screams and booming sounds of the movie through the closed door, but at least I didn’t have to watch the zombies attacking anymore.  

Later that evening, I questioned my husband, “How can you stand to watch movies like that?”  His response piqued my interest.  He told me, “I love zombie movies because they illustrate how most people view the world around them.  They believe that they are the only sane people who have a corner on the truth, and people who oppose them are zombies.”  He went on to explain, “Think about it, people who are resolute in their political beliefs sincerely believe that those with the opposing point of view are clearly messed up in their thinking.”  He gave another example, “How about this,” he said, “When someone offends us, instead of confronting them and working through the difference, we pull away often brooding over the sinfulness of their behavior.”   He continued, “Pretty soon, we find ourselves only associating with a very small group of people, feeling like the people on the outside are zombies who need to be quarantined or given an antidote to make them sane again.”    

As I pondered my husband’s observations I began to realize that he was onto something.  Because of the effects of sin in the world and in our lives, we constantly offend and are offended by the folks around us.  If we neglect to forgive those who offend us, we allow these relational wounds to fester often leading to bitterness or hatred.  If we continue to refuse to deal with the problem, when we are forced to interact with the person who has offended us, it seems that everything they say or do is misconstrued into bad motives or poor judgment on their part.  In effect, we have "zombified" the person, feeling that if only they were rational human beings they would see things our way.  Pretty soon, we are left with only a few “sane” people  as our friends.  We rally together to fight off the zombies with the stockpile of weapons gathered in the race to destroy them before they destroy us.

I am convinced there is a better way.  The more clearly I understand the depths of my sinfulness and the heights of the grace of the gospel at work in my life to restore me to a right relationship with my savior, the less I am tempted to judge or “zombify” the people who offend me.  This truth is illustrated by Matthew 18: 21-35.  In this passage, Jesus tells the parable of the servant who begs his master to forgive his debt and then turns around and demands that a fellow servant repay him a much smaller debt.  When the fellow servant begs for mercy, the man man responds, not by forgiving his debt, but by putting him in prison.  How foolish the servant was to gladly accept Jesus’ forgiveness, but turn around and condemn his neighbor of a much smaller offense.   Jesus illustrates the fact that since God has forgiven us a debt we could never pay, we ought to turn around and freely forgive those who have offended us.  Matthew 7: 1-5 also lends credence to this principle of forgiveness.  In this passage, Jesus instructs us to take the plank of sin out of our own eye before taking the speck of sawdust out of our brother’s eye.  We must first look at the depths of our sin and our desperate need of a savior.  When we fully realize our standing before a holy God, we begin to see how our neighbor’s offense is in comparison a speck.  When we respond to offenses with humility, then and only then can we work out our differences with godliness.  The truth of the gospel just might be that even I am a zombie in desperate need of the antidote: a saving relationship with a loving savior.