The challenge is necessary, because believers are frequently much too relaxed about holy living. We tend to lower our guard, allowing ourselves to give way to ‘lesser’ sins, such as a little<\/i> covetousness, or a small<\/i> measure of selfishness, or a spot<\/i> of peevishness, or a moment<\/i> of pride, or spasmodic<\/i> skipping of devotions. Moods and tempers (though, of course, not too extreme in scale) are allowed to go unbridled, and perhaps ‘white lies’ and exaggerations also, or fragments of unkind, harmful gossip, and many other slithers and scraps of pre-conversion life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Masters talks about scale again when he comments on 7.14 where Paul says ‘I am carnal, sold under sin.’:<\/p>\n
As with chapter six, the key to the passage is to get the scale<\/i> right, because Paul is not thinking about sins such as murder, adultery or extreme uncleanness. He has in mind the standards of the Christian life, where the aim is much higher. He requires in himself complete<\/i> honesty, total<\/i> unselfishness, the absence<\/i> of pride or self-consideration, unlimited<\/i> kindness, abounding<\/i> love for God, and complete, unwavering<\/i> trust in Him in all circumstances.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Have you ever thought of these passages this way? I have to confess that I have always thought of them as referring to the major sorts of sins, but I think that Dr. Masters is correct in saying that Paul primarily has in view the deeper Christian understanding of sin in these passages. By deeper Christian understanding, I mean that as we go along in our Christian life, we grow in our understanding of the pervasiveness of sin in us and how much we offend God with those things the world may dismiss as ‘little’ sins or, more probably, not sins at all. Pride, ambition, covetousness and the like are often seen by the world as virtues, not vices. When we consider Christian standards, we need to have a deeper understanding of sin in our minds as we set standards for ourselves. The world builds fences for itself to keep it from what it considers to be sin – not much, but of course all agree that murder is wrong, etc. The Christian realizes sin is much deeper than that and must build fences to keep himself as much as possible from the life that dishonours God.<\/p>\n
Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Did you know that the Sword & Trowel still exists? The S & T was Spurgeon’s magazine. During his ministry it enjoyed a wide circulation. The magazine declined on his passing and went out of publication for a time, I believe. The current pastor of the venerable Metropolitan Tabernacle, Spurgeon’s former church, Dr. Peter Masters, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-7g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}