Spiritual Surgery

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. (Psalm 32:5)

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13)

As I have been passing on God’s message, I have severally been accused of being too extreme and out of touch with reality. I am to some a Bible thumping zealot, a thing, sadly to them I will not deny as I am sold out to the Bible and everything it teaches.

But I will deny the charge that I am cruel in my posts even as I confront sin and all that it does to society.

You see we are being conditioned to overlook sin as if ignoring it will provide healing. One motivational preacher after another is lulling us to spiritual sleep even as sin continues gaining a foothold in the lives of believers. We tend to assume that sin will disappear if we blinded our eyes to it. 

But nothing can be farther from it. I compare this with keeping a snake under a woodpile as my tribe would say. Somehow or other it will eventually kill you.

You see in the past firewood was used not only for cooking but heating and lighting as well. This meant that there would be times you will pick them in pitch darkness and so will be unable to see the snake you have nurtured. You might therefore offend it and it then hits back since a snake is not a dog.

That is how sin behaves when we cover it or ignore its existence.

Let me give an example. A young couple goes through holy matrimony as it is called with everybody convinced of that holiness.

Six months down the line they get a ‘miracle’ baby who is not premature in any way. They might have been pillars in whatever ministry they were involved in and so were always assumed to be above board.

The church is in a dilemma. There obviously was some fornication. But the leadership realizes that confronting that sin may cause this ‘investment’ to go elsewhere to run away from the humiliation. They therefore resort to something a friend asked me to do when I confronted him concerning his sin. They will call it water under the bridge since it is past anyway and nothing can be done to reverse it. They assume that only the leadership has noticed it and that the congregation is completely in the dark.

What that leadership fails to realize is that the ‘followers’ see more than the followed as they are looking for examples to imitate. By letting that pass we have given a very good example for them to follow. We have literally given them an object lesson.

Of course somebody else will now sin, even openly. Then we will call them so that we can correct them.

‘But what is the difference between this and what the leader did?’ will be the obvious answer.

By covering up one sin we have opened a floodgate for others. We have unwittingly made our congregation comfortable for sin. We have lowered the standards of the Gospel we proclaim.

But it is even worse. Sin causes spiritual injuries, injuries that affect every part of our being.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. (Psalm 32:3, 4)

It exerts a very heavy toll on the person who has sinned. There is a groaning that can never be solved by anything else except repentance. The groaning is caused by a livid spiritual wound caused by the sin. And this wound, like any other wound is painful, only that the origin of this pain is the spirit.

David was not waxing old because he was physically sick. It was the spiritual wound created by his sin that was gnawing at him to the point that he was physically affected. No other intervention could deal with that wound as it did not have a physical origin. The only confusing part is that it caused physical symptoms due to the duration it had taken before getting the required spiritual attention.

That is what covering sin does to anyone. And that is the result we get any time we decide to overlook sin. Incidentally that is what happens even when the sin we commit is never discovered as we were bright enough to conceal it from everyone else. The wound in the spirit is even worse than when the sin is known as I may be the only one who is aware that I have sinned. It is therefore more disastrous. Worse is that it grows in intensity like a cancerous growth in the body and will kill if not arrested in time.

That is the danger we are exposing our congregants when all we give them is motivation. We want even those who are groaning under the tyranny of sin to feel alright even when their whole system is crying out for relief that can only come from repented and forgiven sin.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. (James 5:16)

In John 8 we see a woman brought to Jesus who was caught red-handed in adultery. I will ask the commonly asked question for a different reason. Where was her partner? What happened to him after escaping the mob? Was he really free?

You see the fact that he escaped death did not really offer him any release. His partner in crime was going to die for their joint sin. Though he initially may have felt lucky or fortunate to have escaped the mob because he could run faster than the mob, he will later feel the guilt of being the cause of his friend’s death, whether by design or accident.

In school I hated cross countries and looked for ways to shorten the courses. But there is one I have been unable to forget though it is over thirty five years ago.

I led a team to cut the journey by more than half and we were discovered. When the names of the offenders were asked for, I was somehow able to escape the dragnet. A girl or two mentioned my name many times but the teacher either ignored or did not hear it. All the others were punished except me. And I have been unable to forget that incident to date.

That is what covered sin does to the heart. We were created to value justice and fairness and our having escaped our due share of the same fuels guilt in our spirits. And that is what had been happening to David. A family had been broken apart because of his sin. A man was dead because of his sin. That was the source of his burden of sin.

All it required was conviction. And that is what the prophet brought about when he confronted the king.

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. (Proverbs 28:13)

This is what we deny our people when all we talk about is motivation.

Motivation is not a bad thing. But its usefulness should be dictated by the need. Motivation as an end is as dangerous as too much sugar in the body. Its usefulness is dictated by moderation.

Another very useful tool we use in preaching is humor. But the same occurs when we stretch it too far as it also makes us clowns without becoming more useful. We will end up thoroughly entertaining our congregations without pointing them to Christ. They can easily remember all the humor we applied without remembering the focus of all that humor.

Not to be left among the useful preaching tools is eloquence and a good grasp of the facts one is preaching. It is very easy for that to shift the focus of the hearers from the Gospel to the preacher of it.

These three tools, useful as they may be, can very easily become stumbling blocks to the presentation of the Gospel. The Gospel must be bare enough to direct the hearers, or readers for us who write, to the clear presentation of the same. The devil will very easily distract our hearers to anything other than the Gospel in our ministry because ONLY THE GOSPEL has the power to rescue people from their sins.

Sin needs soberness to be confronted. And that is what I see whenever I read the Bible. Never have I seen a person who laughed their way to repentance. Nor have I also seen someone who was motivated to aim higher to repentance.

Conviction and repentance are grave matters and require utmost gravity to handle.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. (1Corinthians 2: 1 – 5)

Paul had it all. But he chose to leave it all to present the Gospel in simplicity. And he did this so that the Gospel can stand out clearly on its own.

The reason sin ought to be confronted head on is because any time it touches anything it must defile it by leaving its mark. By avoiding the offense of the cross which is confronting sin we leave sin comfortably growing in the spirit of one so defiled. It then starts slowly by slowly exerting its power in its host.

But even worse is that sin leaves a wound in the spirit where it made an impact. That made a breach at the point it broke the spiritual resistance. It thus leaves one in great spiritual trauma, trauma that one finds hard to confess because it is difficult to understand how one could sink so low as to commit the kind of breach the sin occasioned. But it also leads us to other sins since we have ‘discovered’ that we have the capacity to appear holy yet we are in sin.

And that is why motivation becomes so dangerous. It seeks to give comfort that the enemy needs as a great partner to guard one from confronting the conviction of God’s Spirit.

Unless confronted, that injury from the wound grows in power and influence to the point that it defiles everything and everyone around the offender.

Absalom had a genuine complaint when Amnon was not punished for raping his sister. That bitterness was left festering until it found its release in his scheming his brother’s murder. But it then created another problem as he also needed to be punished and so he fled. His father loved his then eldest son and, like he did with Amnon was unable to punish him. But he banished him so that he does not appear like an accessory to that murder. The bitterness grows even as he is excluded from the palace.

By the time he is accepted in the palace he is the epitome of bitterness with the whole kingdom’s leadership becoming the target. Even overthrowing his father was not enough to deflate that bitterness. It had to end in his death. But I suspect that David was unable to confront his sons due to the fact that sin had already left a mark on him. He must have been asking what right he had to deal with someone whose sin was smaller than his serial acts.

Again let us look at Esau. Through short sightedness he sells his birthright, a thing that leaves him bitter though he ought to have been bitter against his folly. But bitterness normally looks for another culprit. And this he left festering.

Years later the same brother deceives even his father with the advice of his mother. But instead of looking at the source of that deception (Rebecca), he rekindles his growing bitterness that he is now ready to kill his brother. But his brother doesn’t allow him that pleasure so the bitterness continues growing. It is then passed on to his whole posterity though they were never there when it happened.

We see the fruit of that when Israel seeks to pass through Edom, even if they offered to pay for the water they drunk. They are so bitter that they pick weapons to block Israel.

That bitterness was passed on to the Amalekites, though Amalek was not even an official son as he was the son of a concubine to Esau’s son.

But we see it best when we read Obadiah and the reason Edom was judged.

Sarah leads Abraham to become impatient with the promise for a son that they got a child by a slave. But then the promised son comes and Sarah has to dispose of Ishmael. But they do so without sorting out the issues and mother and son leave in bitterness, a bitterness that has not been addressed to date.

Terrorism is the result of that unaddressed bitterness. And that is the reason Israel the land is a boiling pot as Ishmael still feels entitled to the birthright as the firstborn. That is why they would prefer to destroy Israel instead of leaving it to the ‘imposter’.

Abraham gets another wife after the death of Sarah who bears him several other sons. But these are disposed of properly to create room for the son of the promise. And they never caused any problem to their brother.

This is what I mean when I say that unaddressed sin will fester and grow in the spirit until it gets an opportunity to explode. Then we will wonder what happened.

Sin starts long before it is committed. The seeds are normally planted in the past.

Someone does not just become corrupt when they get a position where they are exposed to bribes. The opportunity just created an outlet for what was inside to come out. Someone does not just have sex because the hormones are on fire or the friend is irresistible. Sin came when preparation met opportunity.

For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: (Matthew 15:19)

That is the reason in the last post I said that divorce starts long before the marriage. We have planted the seed that makes marriage impossible by the habits we have developed and actions we are involved in even before marriage. And that is the reason I said that remarriage will fail and not because someone does not really want it to but because they have not dealt with the issues that had necessitated the break of the earlier marriage.

It is in the context of healing that divorce and remarriage can be addressed in a healthy way when we honestly look at factors that predisposed someone to divorce as they had been so set to making their marriage work when they were saying their vows. We will look at things that do not even appear to have any bearing at all to the marriage to help us remove the virus that got into the marriage, sometimes long before it was entered into.

Let me give you an example. Let us say that your parents normally talked badly about this other tribe or clan saying that husbands and wives from there are worthless or inhospitable or something plain negative. Then you get married to someone from there of course because ‘love is blind’.

What happens when you have a disagreement or they do something ‘stupid’? Chances are that you will fall into the default position and start remembering all that was said. Though you know better, you find yourself agreeing with something you disagreed with when you got married and the marriage was flowing well. A simple disagreement may then lead you to speak some folly you do not even believe because you slid back to the default values you had proved wrong in the earlier days of your marriage. Then the collision occurs because your partner also falls back to theirs, making both of you bigots, none who is able to see, leave alone reason objectively.

Sin is worse as it plants new default values, values that have been stained by the sin and resulting guilt. Worse still they will lean more towards sin than righteousness because our resistance to sin has already been breached.

That is the reason sin must be conclusively dealt with before any major decision is made to avoid the recurrence of the sinful tendencies.

If we get back to the young ministers who got a miracle baby, we will be able to appreciate the point I want to put across. From their position in ministry it must have been farthest from their imagination that they would have sex before they got married. Chances are that they spoke so loudly and judged so harshly those who could not wait for their wedding to get the pleasures of sex.

What then happened? Chances are they overlooked one or two key pointers and left a wee door slightly ajar for the devil to exploit. They may have discovered that it had gone too far to turn back and therefore sinned sexually. 1 Corinthians 10: 12 is instructive there.

That fall brought intense guilt and self deprecation. They simply could not believe they had committed the sin they had been preparing others to avoid. They simply could not bring themselves to acknowledge that they are as filthy as those they had been rallying others against for doing just that. But they discover that it was pleasurable too, especially if nobody else found out.

Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. (Proverbs 9:17)

But the most important fact is that their strong wall has been broken and their defenses have been destroyed. Their resistance has been rendered useless against sexual temptation.

Due to that chances are that they will dip their fingers into that honey pot again and probably again. But they will behave as if they are as perfect as they had been, unstained by the world. The main reason is that they are fighting guilt yet are not willing to confess their sin. Their attempt at covering sin without forsaking it is what leads them down and down.

Then the girl misses her periods. It is now a crisis of gigantic dimensions. But they are not as yet ready to confess sin. And it is becoming too sweet to forsake. In fact it is the one that gives them the strength to weaken the conviction and guilt that crush their spirits so. It is the one that gives them strength to behave as if they have not sinned. But it has gotten to another level.

Remember David calling Uriah from the battle for the express purpose of having sex with his wife? That is what must now be done. You see Bathsheba could not explain how she conceived when her husband was away and that sin needed to be covered up. That is why he had to be killed when he refused that pleasure however genuine his reasons.

This is what our spiritual superstars resort to. They must arrange a wedding as soon as possible so that the pregnancy will appear as normal as possible.

But what has this whole thing done to their spirits?

They have lost their spiritual stature. They are empty shells. But to others they are as spiritually virile as they were before they sinned because they may be the only ones who have the facts. They might appear even more spiritual as they will use more effort to convince others that they are not as dirty as they feel. And the wedding becomes key to that cover up.

Ministry stops being what it was before they sinned. But that single sin, however pleasurable it might have appeared, starts them on a journey to perdition. And that journey will continue downward for as long as they have not acknowledged their sin. That marriage which earlier was the pinnacle of their relationship and ministry becomes just an opportunistic marriage of convenience. It might not take long before what God and the two were preparing as their greatest ministry opportunity becomes hell’s greatest weapon against not only their ministry but the marriage.

But God’s story does not end there like it ended with Amnon and Absalom. He intends to restore them not only to healing but also usefulness. But there is no short cut. They must face their sin and repent of the same before their lives, marriage and ministry can amount to anything in the eyes of God. Otherwise their effort and visible fruit is the seed of rebellion.

If their marriage breaks down it will be impossible to restore it before dealing with the seed that was sown when they sinned. And that is where remarriage will be disastrous should any of them pursue it.

But please get me right. I am not saying that divorce is an indication that the couple had sex before marriage though sometimes it is. There are times one can’t put a finger on the cause. But is we pursued healing instead of reconciliation we will have a better chance of restoring the individuals involved. It is after the healing that we then pursue other things.

Sometimes the cause could be that someone refused to listen to friends, or even the inner voice and thought that the person was too precious to lose. Sometimes they took too long before getting married so that they got bored of each other by the time they got married. Other times one might have been an experimenter with relationships, even sex. Many times one person was too desperate to think straight when a person came around.

But as with relationships no one size fits another. I am reading the story of John Wesley and his marriage was a trial I doubt anyone but him could have endured, leave alone handled. Yet he was sold out to God.

We must preach against sin to be able to be involved in the healing. That is God’s way.

Which say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits: (Isaiah 30:10)

This is the other side, the side motivators lean on and the one the Bible speaks so strongly against because it covers sin for the pain it will cause before the healing is effected. That is the reason I called this post a surgery.

Like with a surgeon who must cut open and expose the diseased organ before excising whatever problem there was, the Gospel must first expose sin to be able to deliver one from it.

Many people who are taken for deliverance sessions and seek a lot of spiritual intervention can easily be healed if they dealt with sin in their lives. Many who are fighting with demons from all fronts may just need to confront sin in their lives and the demons will flee so fast that they might think they had been imagining things.

I know ministers who have been in ministry for so long as spiritual shells because they either denied that they sinned or concealed that sin. And that opened an avalanche of deception and pretence so that their followers are deceived. Some will start their own churches because they were confronted by the one they were pastoring. Incidentally that is what happens when sin is covered for long. Someone accepts the deception of hell and lives according to the dictates of hell.

My prayer is that these ministers will reconnect to their Savior through repentance. Then they can start hearing fresh orders instead of operating on cruise control.