Gabrielle's Sins

So this is a Khristi-esque post...it actually began life as a response to someone else's blog. Gabi was posting about SIN, and to sum it all up, she gave the good hard truth about the consequence of sin...
But as usual, I'm exhuming the corpse to figure out if it didn't really die of a broken heart after all...
Sin.
Ah, the tug...
The darkness...
Sin is so elusive. You're sinning right now. Grace is like a hard drive that never has a chance to spin down because we keep accessing it. All the time. The fact that I'm still awake even though I know I have to rest myself for the productive ministry ahead of me tomorrow is a sin. BEING AWAKE RIGHT NOW IS A SIN. My stomach is digesting some smoked almonds. They were about 18 grams of fat per serving. I had TWO. And after my sushi binge, which I charged to me Dad's credit card, eating those almonds was a sin. I went to see a film (Constantine) even though I knew it had what the Motion Picture Association of America calls "demonic images". I can't escape sin. It's the flow of this world...sin is continually inhabited by God for the purpose of teaching us about The Kingdom. The Bible is clear that God doesn't tempt us...we are tempted when we are hijacked by our own sushi, almond, and constantine desires. But God is so expensive! He uses those times of costly sinning to teach us. He turns are mmmph into helpful manure....All the time. It's a touchy topic. Because most of us want to read Romans 7 and be like: "Bet! Paul sinned? I can go ahead and do mine too!" But I don't think that's the purpose. The true purpose is "Surely not!"...The purpose is that God has inhabited this darkness and turned it around. So that we can look into a sin-shaped man's eyes (Jesus) and see God. So that a rain cloud can witness to me, and so that I can see God's delicate hand of salvation in a Tsunami disaster.
So sin is very useful to the believer, because the pure simple fact of the matter is that sin no longer corrupts unto death. It simply makes the water level rise until the toilet is flushed...like a fever that makes you sick to make you better. Believer's can't commit a single sin that God won't use to deliver you from something you didn't even know you were stuck in.

My life motto is: "God is Strong!"
Strong enough to turn a switchblade into a scalpel and back into a switchblade again before anyone is the wiser. He breaks things to fix things and creates life out of death.

Have you ever pruned a plant? It's a sad process. And the whole time you're like: "This can't be right. There won't be anything left when I'm done!" and then you walk away feeling like you've done something horrible when in fact, you've saved the plant's life and multiplied it's fruit-bearing abilities.
Sin is like a blade that we whip out, that God grabs onto and uses the way He sees fit.

Just look at the geneology of Christ. Jesus' great great grandmother was a whore. Another one of his relatives was an adulteress, one committed incest, another was a half-breed...the list goes on...not to mention Jacob the liar, Solomon the man-slut and countless other SINS that worked together for GOOD to birth Jesus "who was called Christ (annointed)". Your sin is also working together to bear you something Christian or something 'annointed'.

You can't help it along though. I think that's where Gabi gets grafted back in...because my thesis is that God uses sin to build us up, but if you throw in your own sins just for the heck of it, then you're basically saying that you can help God's design which sets yourself up in His place which basically smacks God in the face...like saying "Nah Dog, use this paintbrush..."

KEEP READING, YOU LAZY MONKEY-EATER

So when you grab the controls, you're not HELPING God or giving him more glory, you're really steering yourself off course, which will just take more pain to correct...It's a very thin line, and like the Washington Post, if you don't get it, then you just don't get it...but if you see it, then congrats. God doesn't send sin, but when saints sin, since he's in them, he ends in sending sin on his errands. Got it?

Sweet.

And the trip-up is in thinking that we can wrangle sin and send sin on OUR errands. Not freakin' likely. Sin used to own you, homey. Sin is like your old girlfriend or boyfriend who you think you can just get back with for your own purposes, who winds up infecting your life on some whole other crazy levels. Sin is like "just one drink", and the next thing you know you've passed out from the tequila shirtless with a sombrero on your head and all you have is polaroids to prove it. Sin flirts back, she'll see your bet and raise you the pot. Sin promises much and delivers notta THING. So if you flirt with sin you get beat up.

Personal Story That's probably NONE of your business:

The other night before bed, I decided to flip on the TV.
All we have is basic cable and the random free Showtime channel.
What's so bad about basic cable, right?
Well I'm flip flip flipping, and I guess my sin clock is not as out of whack as I'd thought because I pass by (B)ooties (E)xposed (T)elevison, and my friend Nelly is there in all his Tip Drilling glory.
Now I have a choice to make. Stay on or go off...
Miraculously, my guilt, shame and willpower jumped in and had me turn off the TV and go to bed.
Score, right? Victory, right? I said "NO." loud and clear, right?
Wrizzong.
That night I'm tossing and turning and bieng chased be demons in my dreams and I get the night terrors, and I can't move and I have to jolt myself awake, and I can't stay awake and every drifting dream is vile and tormenting, and I get up for a glass of water and my six-foot-two $2.60 frame can't stay on it's own legs...and the room is spinning...
That's what a flirt will get you. And I had the nerve to be MAD...
I was like, "God, I turned it OFF! I didn't let it linger, I didn't surf to the bad sites, I didn't 'be alone with myself.' I just turned it off and went to sleep."

But God knew my motives. God knew the flirt in me. God showed me what a flirt was worth in his eyes. Because my flirt had me feeling like I had done something...as though MY WILL was the thing that reached out and saved me. Not so. God's not interested in clean strong robots who obey rules. God wants weak-strengthened refined people who simply submit to the spirit.

Oh man guys, I hate when it sounds like I'm preaching...so I'm going to bed now...but you gotta feel me on this...God's word is solid. No ifs ands or buts about it. Just don't forget that God is Strong and God is Love... God solved his only problem a looooooooooooooong time ago...now everything is icing on the cake, and you better believe that if he's had 2,000 years to think about it, that he's figured out a way to increase his "winnings" so to speak...to heap up as MUCH glory as he can...and to show as much LOVE as he can, and to teach as MUCH as he can...

I love y'all.
Goodnight.
(Don't take that as an endorsement for Constantine. We'll have to talk about that later.)
PEACE!

Riddle of the week:
Are the wages of sin still death? Careful how you answer, now...