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To: CondoleezzaProtege
Those within the Church, if they are not regularly taking the grace and means provided by Christ to grow in holiness will not simply not grow holy-- they will grow less holy, more and more configuring themselves to the world and less and less to Christ. The sins among Christians--including Christian leaders-- is a reflection of the sinfulness and permissive mores of the times they live in. In the times when we were a more moral society, people at least gave lip service to the virtues and adhered to them, if for no other reason, because there were social and sometimes legal consequences. And it was more or less easier to do because society as a whole by and large acknowledged the goodness of God's laws. Now that hardly anyone knows what the virtues are (let alone try to strive after them), practically everything is permissible.

Not every fallen Christian or Christian leader starts out as a hypocrite, but eventually, small compromise after small compromise, "small" sin after "small" sin, they are able to justify it in their own minds because they are not holding themselves up to Christ's standard, but the world's and they think that as long as no one else knows, they are doing OK. Then when they fall, they fall hard. Their deeds are suddenly exposed by the light and there are no more rationalizations or excuses to hide behind.

9 posted on 01/23/2022 10:44:06 AM PST by fidelis (Ecce Crucem Domini! Fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda, Radix David! Alleluia! )
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To: fidelis

“So dear brethren! this was the first and the gravest aspect under which the penitent and the forgiven man in my text thought of his past, that in it, when he was wildly and eagerly rushing after the low and sensuous gratification of his worst desires, he was rebelling against, and wandering far away from, the ever-present Friend, the all-encircling support and joy, the Lord, his life. You do not understand the gravity of the most trivial wrong act when you think of it as a sin against the order of Nature, or against the law written on your heart, or as the breach of the constitution of your own nature, or as a crime against your fellows. You have not got to the bottom of the blackness until you see that it is flat rebellion against God Himself. This is the true devilish element in all our transgression, and this element is in it all.

Oh! if once we do get the habit formed and continued until it becomes almost instinctive and spontaneous, of looking at each action of our lives in immediate and direct relation to God, there would come such an apocalypse as would startle some of us into salutary dread, and make us all feel that ‘it is an evil and a bitter thing’ {and the two characteristics must always go together}, ‘to depart from the living God.’

The great type of all wrongdoers is in that figure of the Prodigal Son, and the essence of his fault was, first, that he selfishly demanded for his own his father’s goods; and, second, that he went away into a far country. Your sins have separated between you and God. And when you do those little acts of selfish indulgence which you do twenty times a day, without a prick of conscience, each of them, trivial as it is, like some newly-hatched poisonous serpent, a finger-length long, has in it the serpent nature, it is rebellion and separation from God.”

Maclaren

https://biblehub.com/commentaries/maclaren/psalms/32.htm


10 posted on 01/23/2022 10:47:39 AM PST by Bob434
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To: fidelis

See my post above, it,goes along with you statement about “small compromises” (when man seeks,out,the “lower pleasures” of earthly,life rather than the “higher rest” that can be had in Christ who giveth to all liberally who ask” it’s there for the taking, IF we want it, but dadly we co tent ourselves with the lower pleasures that never satisfy, that fade quickly, that leave the ones who,indulge in them wanting more and more,and never being satisfied fully


12 posted on 01/23/2022 10:52:48 AM PST by Bob434
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