To Encourage You

Psalm 19:13 “Keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me! Then I shall be blameless, and innocent of great transgression.”

One of man’s tendencies is to presume on the patience and mercy of God. To “presume” is to proudly take liberties. Usually when someone cares about what God may think about the way they live, they have an active conscience that is tweaked whenever they sin against Him. But sin has a way of deadening the conscience, and if we don’t respond to the “tweaks,” each time we again violate our conscience it becomes less and less sensitive. We can get to a point where we’ve engaged in a particular sin so long, and seemingly gotten away with it, i.e., it seems like there have been no ramifications from it, that we can deceive ourselves into thinking that what we are doing “isn’t really that bad” and we can even get to the point where we think that God is ok with disobedience. This is especially true for those sins that “everyone is doing” and that “everyone” has been doing for a very long time. He’s very patient and merciful, correct? This is presumption with respect to sin and presumption regarding God’s character. We forget that God is so pure that he cannot look upon sin (Habakkuk 1:13). He hates sin in all its forms. For some sense of this we need only look to Eve’s one act of disobedience which led to the curse on her and each and every one of us, her children, and ultimately to the horror of the crucifixion of God’s own son. May the pure Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world make us sensitive to sin, including long-standing patterns of sin that we may have become insensitive to.