Respectable Sins

So it has been a while since my last post. I apologize for that. I was out of town for 5 out of 7 days last week, which made it difficult to keep the blog updated. But don't worry, this is a real long post to make up for it. Things are still a little crazy and I am going to be heading back out of town on Thursday, to go up to Columbus to see my parents and celebrate birthdays with them.

Today's post is something I've been wanting to do for a while now. Our Bible study read the book Respectable Sins by Jerry Bridges over the summer and I wanted to share a little bit about it that stuck out to me and encourage you to read it if you have not done so already.

Respectable Sins is a book about the sin in our life that we either don't notice or justify by thinking that it is not that big of a deal, or that compared to what we see others doing, we're really not that bad. Jerry Bridges uses words like "cosmic treason", "rebelling against God" and "despising God" to describe our sin. Even the smallest little sin that we may justify as not being a big deal or not hurting anyone is despising God. So if the title of the book didn't catch my attention this certainly did. I don't despise God. I love God. But John 14:20 says "Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me." Maybe Jerry Bridges wasn't so far off.

But the beauty of this book, is that while it starts out with a bit of a punch to the gut, it goes on to remind us that our sin has already been forgiven. Bridges writes, "The only sin that can be successfully fought against is forgiven sin. We cannot begin to deal with the activity of sin in our lives until we have first dealt with its guilt...God through Christ has dealt with our guilt. The only basis for God's forgiveness is the blood of Christ shed on the cross for us." And that is the beauty of this book. It lays out how we can fight against sin in our lives, not through our own power but with God's power. It is also super convicting with about 13 chapters on common respectable sins so you can have plenty of practice fighting against sin with God's power. Chapters with titles like "Ungodliness, unthankfulness, selfishness, pride, impatience and irritability, judgementalism, etc. But its good, because we need these things pointed out to us. I for one want to love God and I know the best way I can do that is to be obedient and this book took me a huge step in that direction.


In other news we had our young life planning I beekend this weekend. It was lots of fun. We got some good planning for the semester done. I balled like a baby as we had some time to talk about why we love Kari (this was her last young life leadership with us). We also went canoeing, which I was real excited about becaue as you may have read a few posts back our last canoeing trip failed. This one was loads of fun, except for the 3 trees that Derek ran us into, which cause our canoe to be invaded by spiders, followed by us tipping. The current pushed us into a tree stump that was sticking out. Because we were trying to turn we hit it with the side of our boat instead of head on. I leaned over to avoid being stabbed by the broken limbs of the tree, which caused us to tip and our canoe to get pinned up against the tree stump, which took forever to free. I think most people canoeing ended up tipping because others tipped them over, I'm pretty sure we were the only ones who managed to tip because of the river. That's embarassing. Oh well, good memories right? So fun hanging out all weekend with our fabulous LCA team and wonderful young life leader friends. Love them all!