Hearing the Bad News

How do you respond when someone tells you that the life you are living is wrong? What if the thing you are accused of is something that you are powerless to change? What do you do with that?

Last night, my family and I watched one of those thought provoking Christmas movies; The Muppet Christmas Carol. Alright. Muppet movies aren’t generally made to challenge us. The tale is an old one. Ebenezer Scrooge is given the opportunity to see his life as other people see it. He is confronted with the painful reality of who he really is; a stingy, cold hearted, miser. Fortunately, Scrooge somehow has a complete transformation between the time he goes to bed on Christmas Eve and the time he wakes up on Christmas morning.

A close personal friend of mine made a comment on one of my posts a little while back saying that, ‘for the most part, people don’t change.’ He’s right. Yet there is something to be said for having personal resolve, whether to make change in our finances or our personal health. What about matters of sin and righteousness?

Jeremiah 13:23 (New International Version, ©2010)

23 Can an Ethiopian change his skin
or a leopard its spots?
Neither can you do good
who are accustomed to doing evil.

Just as a leopard is completely unable to change its spots, there are things in our lives that we are completely unable to change. So what do you do when someone tells you that your spots are sinful? I mean, if you are a leopard, you can’t do anything about them can you? Where does that leave you? Eternally condemned?

We resent people who tell us that our spots are sinful don’t we? We were born this way. Just as an Ethiopian can’t change his skin (not that there is any need to change his skin), since we are powerless about our situation, the person who is accusing us is either being hateful or trying to bully us. Or maybe we take it even harder than that. Maybe there is something in our mind which isn’t completely at ease with the spots we have, but given the helplessness of our condition to do anything about them, we become seriously depressed, even to the point where we despair even of life.

You see that in the world don’t you? Well, maybe not your world. Your world is filled with nothing but fresh air and sunshine, where life is beautiful all of the time. In the world that I live, people continue to live under burden of the knowledge that the spots they wear, are in fact spots, which cannot be removed.

A friend of mine named Billy found himself in just such a place. Billy worked stocking shelves at Mark’s Work Warehouse. Billy had his own spots that he was unable to do anything about. He was addicted to pornography. It was something that revealed itself during his teenaged years. In those days, Billy used to take comfort on the thought of getting married. Certainly, ‘When I get married’, he thought, ‘then I’ll be able to overcome it, because then I’ll have an outlet for my sexual desires.’

I have a news flash for you folks. Sin doesn’t go away because you get married. So Billy got married, all the while continuing to find ways to look at naked pictures. The married life which he anticipated to help deliver him, only served to beat him down all the more. No longer was he just a teenaged boy looking at dirty pictures, he was now a married man, looking at other women.

In time, God blessed Billy with a child. ‘This should do it.’, Billy thought. ‘How can I be a dad and continue living this kind of life?’ Having children stops you from sinning right? Now his condition was even worse than before. No longer was he the teenager or the married man looking at dirty pictures, he was now both a husband and a father.

What do you do in a place like that? Do you hold your head up high? There are only two options that the world gives us for dealing with our spots. We either live in hiding, or we come out, and in my opinion, neither response are completely liberating. Up until that point in his life, Billy was living in hiding. Fortunately, Bill did have something going for him. He had a friend who persistently encouraged him to go to Promise Keepers.

If you don’t know, Promise Keepers has a bad rap for telling men that they are perverts who need to get right with God. It’s not a popular message is it? A lot of men get freaked out with that kind of thing. How many liars do you know who like to be called liars? Billy knew. He knew that if he went, that he’d be confronted about his sin. How many of you would go somewhere that you knew would do the same? When you accuse others of sin, they think you’re hateful don’t they?

Billy’s friend persisted. At Promise Keepers, Billy learned that he neither had to live in hiding, nor did he have to come out. Coming out is when we reveal our sin to the world in the hopes that people will embrace us along with our sin. Billy realized that instead of hiding or coming out, that he needed to confess. Confession is when you call your sin for what it is, and admit it to God, to yourself and to at least one other human being. Instead of getting all bent out of shape for being accused as a sinner, Billy claims that,

“Other than my salvation, it was the most liberating time in my life.”

How rare and awesome is that?

I present to you, that the story of Ebenezer Scrooge is one of fiction; one which makes us feel fuzzy in thinking that we can change for the better, when in fact, we are helpless to do what needs to be done. We can’t change our spots, but they can be changed for us. Are we willing to see ourselves as we are in the eyes of the only One who is able to do anything about it?

Christ didn’t come to help us feel good about who we are or to build up our self esteem. He came as a light into this dark world. I know it hurts when you look directly into the light, but please consider doing exactly that.