Every journey has some first steps. You need a passport in order to travel internationally. If you are going across an ocean you need a ticket of some type, plane or ship. Most of us would have to save some money for the trip. We would need to pack a suitcase. Don’t forget your toothbrush!
If you are taking a journey to a new career, you would want to do some research to make sure you were heading the right direction for you personally. Will the new career meet your goals, both in the short term and the long? I would want to know if there would be a paying job at the other end of the training. I also know that a certain level of satisfaction is needed in our work. Very few people enjoy every minute of their jobs, but many find enough satisfaction to keep them going. The satisfaction might be in the paycheck and the paid bills, rather than in the work itself.
One important step in our spiritual journey is the acknowledgement of the presence of sin in our lives. It is not that we are actively participating in sin all the time. It is instead that the root of sin is inside us. When we do sin acts they originate in us. We can’t point some other direction in a blame game. Some have named this the sin nature. The starting point of sin in our lives is us.
John writes that we can’t claim that this seed of sin doesn’t exist in us. If we claim that we are the exception to the rule, that we don’t have sin, this claim doesn’t change the facts. We all have sin in us. No amount of prayer and Scripture memorization can take it away. It will be with us until we get our new glorified bodies. And if we don’t believe this we are deceiving ourselves. We are doing the disappearing card trick on ourselves. And as the magician, we know right where the card is at all times. We can’t trick ourselves.
So it is with this first step in our spiritual journey. We can’t hide sin from ourselves. It is present and we must admit its presence in us, not just in the world or in other people. It is crouching at our door, as the LORD told Cain before he killed his brother. And if we can’t accept this truth, we have no hope of salvation. The truth can’t find root in our heart. Besides, why would you want to take medicine for a sickness you don’t have? If you don’t have sin, you don’t need a sacrifice for your sin.
And yet many today in our world try to say that sin is a nonexistent remnant of a past and backward way of relating to the world and each other. They want to say that we have grown beyond such simplistic and controlling concepts. We are more enlightened than those who lived with such ignorance. We aren’t limited like they were. We live without such backward restrictions.
But those who want to deny sin’s existence have to live their lives either with blinders on their eyes or their head in the sand. Sin is rampant in the world. The evil that continues to rear its ugly head is real. And those who can’t name it as it is must invent cleaver ways of avoiding its definition. We can’t talk about the dangers of Islam because Islam isn’t any better or worse than any other belief system. They apply whitewash on all the evils done as a result of those who practice Islam after the example of their prophet Mohammed. They say it must be a lack of job opportunity that drives them to this violence. Or their need for better education, or healthcare, or food and water. Any and every other cause is substituted in a desperate attempt to avoid naming it sin.
And those who can’t label evil sin, both in themselves and in their world, are deceiving only themselves. They are declaring that they don’t have the Truth.
The Arnold Journey 