God’s Touch and Sin’s End

Copyright 2007 by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

Once we have tasted of Heaven continuing to live voluntarily in a hell of our own making is no longer an option for most of us. The sins that once captivated us are progressively exposed for what they are every time we are visited by the reality of God’s loving touch in our lives.

Before we crossed the threshold of salvation we thought the sins we committed actually gave us some kind of life. Then we realized that they were killing us and many of us had come close enough to the final spiritual death they engendered to deeply understand, perhaps better than most, that drinking the poison of transgression had to stop.

Soon, however, most new Christians realize that some sins are more easily shed than others. Often the initial transformative power of conversion allows us to put down one or more of the sins that were present in our lives. Others are not given up so easily. This is most often true with habitual transgressions that resulted from lifestyle choices we made as non-believers. Habits are not easily broken. Some Christian still struggle with saying no to certain actions even years after Christ entered their lives.

I will not presume to judge how long someone can fail to have full victory over habitual sin without that failure doing irreparable damage to their relationship with God. The process of sanctification is just that, a process, and the purification of a soul is measured over the span of years, not days or weeks. The key, it seems to me, is attitude. There is a world of difference between one who continues to vigorously resist whatever the particular temptation is, confessing when he or she falls, and someone who most of the time gives in to that temptation and is decreasingly concerned about it.

For many of us taking the second path is not one we could easily consider. I often tell people I am witnessing to that the first ten seconds of the compassionate presence of God, which I experienced at my time of conversion from Atheism, surpassed every experience the world had offered me prior to that time. Since then I have been blessed by other moments of unspeakable joy in communion with Him. Even when such moments are widely dispersed in the midst of long periods of great trial they do not fail to profoundly encourage me. I think of them as “postcards from Heaven”.

All Christians receive such moments of blessing at various times to varying degrees. When we are caught up in these moments committing sin is the last thing on our minds and hearts. When our eyes are filled with the surpassing goodness and beauty of God nothing else matters. As the hymn writer tells us “the things of this world grow strangely dim”.

After such experiences end what does not end is the deep heart-awareness that nothing is better than this. The believer is haunted by the memory of times of intimacy with God. Sadly the old temptations return as we descend into the valley after our time on the mountain-top. But the knowledge that the pleasure of sin does not come close to what we were lifted into during that blessed time does not completely leave us. It is hard to return to the sin-induced hells of our own making afterwards. We have known something (or, more accurately, Someone) surpassingly greater than whatever pleasure the sin has given us in our life and that stays with us. Thank God this is true.

We do well to call to our memory what it was like to dwell in the light of His countenance whenever the struggles of the Christian life tempt us to give up and give in. We also do well to look forward with the eyes of faith to the next time Our Lord will touch us with His love. These times, both remembered and looked forward to, are powerful motivators in our ongoing battle with temptation as they speak to us of the final victory over sin which is God’s will for every one of His children.