070520 Steeple Article – Climb the Steeple when Your Conscience is Bugging You

Mother’s Day Sunday afternoon Annemarie made a strange request. She said that because our eldest daughter and son-in-law had seen the “Spider-Man 3” movie for their anniversary, she wanted to see the movie with me. So we feasted on pop corn and lemonade while watching a very fictional character named Peter Parker (a cross between Peter Pan and Clark Kent) allow anger and revenge to take root in his heart as he fights super villains and his own inner moral battle of hatred, anger, greed and pride. Instead of portraying a super hero with seemingly perfect will power and self-control, that movie makes more realistic observations that without God we are trapped in our personal struggle between good and evil. But surely people don't need to watch Spider-Man to understand that.
Paul in the seventh chapter of his letter to the church in Rome says that Christ tears His followers away from a sinful way of doing whatever we feel we can get away with, while sin would call most of the shots as the old law code hems us in. Christ sets us free from oppressive regulations so as to be free to live a new life in the freedom of God.
The Mosaic law has a perfectly legitimate function in pointing out the super hero powers that it would take to, for instance, keep just one command perfectly like “You shall not covet.” Fictional characters like Spider-Man suggest that we could dress covetousness up to look like virtue and ruin our lives with it.
The truth is that I won’t ever have super powers to fight the evil within me and win without God’s re-creative power through Jesus Christ. My daily temptation to sin in small, seemingly insignificant ways will take over my best intentions, unless God steps in and changes my life so I can make the right decisions. Otherwise, sin can use even goodness as a cover to tempt me to do what would finally destroy me. By hiding within God’s good commandment, sin does far more mischief than it could ever have accomplished on its own (Paraphrasing from “The Message” by Peterson).
If you have a similar struggle and confess that you already know God’s commands, but still can’t keep it perfectly, then please pray this prayer with me:
Dear Heavenly Father, sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions and I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in the right actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. Please come into my life make all of me obedient like Jesus. Make me like Your Son and save me from this terrible life of contradictions where I want to serve You with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different – in the blessed name of Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior, Amen.