A Greater Sickness VI: Against Your Soul

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie. Joined by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany, and host of the

Behold Your God studies by Media Grazie. In the last several weeks, you know, we've talked about sin and the connection that it has to being a virus, and we've kind of made those connections and drawn those distinctions.

And John, where is it we're going to today? Well, we've been trying to get an accurate picture of sin, because it does mask itself.

And that really is one of the strengths of temptation is that temptation never presents itself in its true light.

In other words, sin is the ultimate false advertiser, and it's the best advertiser. You remember what

James says in the first chapter of his book? In verse 16, he says this, Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.

So, I love you, your brothers in Christ, but I'm concerned that you're being deceived. In what way?

Next verse, he says, Every good thing and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the

Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. So, this is a very picturesque way of James saying this.

All things that come from God are good. They're good gifts. They're like the giver.

They stay good. God doesn't shift or change like a shadow. God is immutably or unchangeably good.

Anything that doesn't come from God, so when the temptation comes to you and says, look, I am here to give you happiness, to give it to you right now, to give you at half cost, you know, you don't have to wait on God.

You don't have to do things his way. You can have it here and now. When you accept that lie, what looks like a good gift, as soon as you take it in, it shifts like a shadowy thing.

Sin is kind of like a guy standing on the edge of the light at night in a shadowy street, and he's outside of the bright light, you know, the street lights, and he's offering you something in the shadows.

And you think, I can't even really see what's in your hand, but what he tells me is so exciting.

I'll trust him. So sin has an ability to deceive, and what we want to do is peel that mask off again and get the right view of what sin is.

Now, we're going to pick back up with what we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks, but we're going to look at sin's activities.

You know, several weeks ago, we looked at how sin is against God, and we went through, you know, the different levels of that.

So God is against God's law, it's against his attributes, and it is against his person. But today, not only is sin against you, but it is against your happiness.

And I think that may be surprising because it does promise, I will make you happy, but it never does.

Last week, we talked about how sin enslaves the body and the senses, the things that you can really experience.

Today, we're going to focus more on how it impacts the mind and the relationships.

Yeah, so we could say sin is against man's own soul. And when we talk about the soul, we're talking about the faculties of man that are unique to man, that have a spiritual quality, the mind, the heart, and the will, you know.

So the thoughts, the desires, and the choices of man.

But for the sake of time, we're just going to focus on the mind and give a few examples from that.

How does sin affect the mind? Now, it shouldn't be hard for us to kind of draw a comparison between sin as a spiritual infection and a physical virus, because we all know physical diseases which affect the mind of someone that we love,

Alzheimer's, dementia. I can't imagine many people being adults who don't know someone in their family, you know, a grandparent or an older person who has experienced the ravages of Alzheimer's.

So, a very sad disease as the body is still strong and the mind gets confused.

Sin does that to us. It impacts the mind. And the Bible describes this in so many ways.

Let me just give two examples. In Jeremiah chapter 4, it says that we're plenty intelligent to do what's wrong.

The brain works well for wrong. But when it comes to living the right life, sin makes us stupid.

So here's what Jeremiah says. Chapter 4, verse 22, God says through the prophet,

So, clear picture of the infection of sin.

The brain, the thought life is keenly capable of planning a selfish course.

But as for understanding how to love and live for our God, it's like it's just clueless.

Another example, Paul from Ephesians chapter 4 in verse 18 and 19, he says this,

Being darkened in their understanding. He's describing us before Christ. Being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them, because of the hardness of their heart, and they having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

Now, I think that that's such an important verse because when Paul describes the impact of sin upon our mind, it's not an intellectual problem, it's a spiritual problem.

He's not saying, we read the Bible, we just can't seem to get it. He's saying, there is something that sin does in the thoughts that actually alienates you from God, that makes you want to choose what's wrong, and you choose what's wrong with greed.

You pursue it with this energy because of what sin has done to the way you think.

One example of that can be our memories. When you think about memory,

I remember reading a writer from the early 19th century that described the memory as a golden cabinet in the house.

And it's set up so we can think of it like as a china cabinet, you know. It's there not for the everyday plates.

It's there for the really special stuff. So you put the really pretty plates in the china cabinet.

The memory was given to us by God to store away the most precious things, and it ought to be a thing that you can go to and pull out such sweet, enjoyable things.

You can pull your favorite thing out and look at it and enjoy it, and it's a happy thing. But when sin rules the mind, the cabinet of memory becomes a thing that is filled with foul, sad regrets.

You know, you try to go to sleep at night, and the memory starts to play itself. And you think, man, how do you shut this off?

And you can't. And you remember things that are sad, that are regrets, and you can't seem to shake them.

You remember things so easily that you saw that you should never have looked at, that you heard you should never have listened to.

And yet the memory is so active and agile towards selfishness, but so sluggish toward things that it ought to be active towards.

So for instance, how many times have we said as an excuse, we say, well, I try to memorize

Bible passages, you know, but it's just so hard for me. But it is not hard for me to remember things that orbit

John Snyder, you know, things that tell me that I'm the center of the universe.

Man, I can't forget those. But things that tell me that God is the center, I have to work hard at.

So the mind impacted by sin, especially even the memory. Yeah, but it goes beyond just what we remember in the past, but even to what we think about today and what we're thinking about right now.

You know, John, I've mentioned a couple of times, I love story. And I love not just reading stories, but coming up with stories.

I love telling particularly my kids stories. And there's one thing. There's a constant theme through each of my stories that I think about, whether it's communicating with my children or whether it's just, you know, when those rare moments when

I have no urgent demand on my mind and my mind is just free to wander, you know, wherever it wants to go.

There is one constant and it is this, I'm the hero. Whatever the situation is, whatever the story is.

And I think that in our imagination, it does reveal, right, that just how selfish we are, just how deeply we have sinned.

And so what does your imagination look like? Where does your mind go when it's completely free?

In Genesis 6, 5, God describes humanity's imagination. He says it is only evil continually.

And we've just mentioned one part of the soul, just the mind. But the soul is so vast and it is so important to our being.

You know, that if a man has a healthy, Godward soul, if it's filled with the truths, the realities of God, his body, his outward life could look utterly miserable and empty.

And there's a peace. And we've seen this in sweet saints who have experienced tremendous persecution, pain through sickness, all types of things.

And they are a sweet testimony to the kindness of God. And we've seen others who, you know, by all outward appearances, had the perfect life and yet their soul was troubled and they were miserable.

Another way of looking at the nature of sin as it's active, not just that it is against our own happiness in our soul, it turns our soul against us, but also the way that it affects relationships.

Relationships, of course, you know, are one of the things that we really do hope will bring us great happiness, more so than a possession or an event in our life.

You know, if I could just have this kind of friendship, you know, if I could find a young person,

I think if I could find someone who would love me and we would spend our life together and we'd be like one of those, you know, Pride and Prejudice movies, a happily ever after British movies.

And we could skip the tortured part where they don't tell each other they love each other. We just write off, you know, my wife and I watched those and she thinks, why didn't she just tell him she loved him the first act, you know?

So, we think, you know, this friendship will make me happy in whatever way, you know, a mom having a child saying the child will somehow fill up this empty life of mine.

But sin enters in and it makes the kindest gifts of God, relationships, family, friendships, even the vertical relationship between us and our

Creator, it destroys, it steals from us in every one of those areas. Just think of the primary one with our

Creator. There really is only one person that we can't afford not to have a friendship with. You know, you can afford to have only a few friends.

You know, you can afford not to know everybody. And people say, you know, do you know so -and -so?

Like, actually, I don't know them. Well, you ought to get to meet them. Well, that would be nice, but I can probably have an okay life without meeting so -and -so.

But I cannot be happy if my friendship with my Creator, if the relationship with the

Creator is broken. He's the only person we can't afford to be alienated from. And sin causes there to be an impediment between us and God, so that we distrust

God, so that we reject God and His rights and His descriptions, and we assume those for ourselves.

And God, the Bible says, is offended at us and is alienated from us because of this sin, this object of the offense.

The psalmist talked about this. Let me give you two examples. Psalm 5, verse 4 and 5. We read this, for you are not a

God who takes pleasure in wickedness. No evil dwells with you. All right, so we agree with that.

But then look at how that applies to the person that is unrepentantly clinging to that life.

The boastful will not stand before your eyes. You hate all who do iniquity.

Psalm 7, verse 11, God is a just judge. And God is angry with the wicked every day.

Now, if we think about the wrath of God, we often think end times. Like, okay, so let's say I have 70 years of life on earth.

So, I have 70 years. I can live 69 for myself and get right with God right at the end, you know. And then

I will avoid wrath because wrath comes at the end, you know, judgment day. But actually, there is a sense in which man or a woman or a young person lives under the displeasure of God presently.

It's like the atmosphere. And though God is showing them that common grace, that common kindness that God shows even

His enemies, their life is plagued by the consequences of sin. And one of those is this hanging wrath.

Listen to what John chapter 3, verse 36 tells us. He who believes in the Son has eternal life right now.

But he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him, present tense.

So, he doesn't say this. If you don't obey the Son of God, you will not have everlasting life. And one day, the wrath of God will reach you.

But no, you will not have everlasting life. And right now, the wrath of God hangs over you, the displeasure of your

Creator, a relationship broken by sin. But there are relationships, horizontal relationships that are important as well that sin impacts.

And, you know, I mean, in fact, sin actually destroys it. You know, you mentioned there are people, look, there are people that I'm never going to meet, and that's perfectly okay, and I will survive.

But if the relationship between me and my children were destroyed, or the relationship between me and my wife was destroyed, that would be pretty heart -wrenching.

But that's exactly what sin does. Sin destroys marriages. It destroys families.

And I think we see this, particularly in this season of social isolation. I mean, if you spend any time on Facebook, you're seeing parents talking about how their kids are driving them up a wall, and you see kids talking about how their parents or their siblings are driving them nuts.

And we say these things in humor, but there is some truth in the fact that, I think what has been easy before has been, okay, everybody goes off and we live our own lives at work, in the office, in the schools, wherever we happen to be.

And we don't have to really deal with the sin or with the things that we see in family members' lives or in the relationship that we have.

But now we're going on three weeks, four weeks, six weeks of being at home all the time together.

And I think my prayer is that we're actually beginning to see where we've allowed sin to really drive a wedge between us and to deal with that.

But the thing is, none of this should be a surprise to us. We all deal with sin. We all deal with pride.

Proverbs 13 .10 tells us that by pride comes absolutely nothing but strife.

Yeah, and James picks that up in James chapter 4, when he talks about what's the cause of these divisions among you.

You know, it's your selfishness. Sadly, the destructive impact of sin on relationships doesn't stop with God or with people at work or people at home, but it impacts

Christians. It impacts people at a church. When you think of the unity that a church can have, it's a spiritual unity.

So it's not a unity around a common view. So, you know, we say, well, everybody in this church loves the

King James Version Bible, so we're united. Or everyone in this church is a Calvinist. Everyone in this church is all about the end times, you know, in the book of Revelation.

And everyone in this church is about missions. There are different themes in the scripture that we can hold in common and it's a cohesive bond.

But really, the unity that believers have is based in being placed into Christ spiritually and every believer in Christ.

And that means we're all part of a living temple that's being built by the work of God, Paul says.

And so there is this wonderful cohesiveness, you know, where our lives are woven together spiritually.

Fundamentally, we belong to each other like a body where all the parts are attached. You know, we're not like Lego people where you could take us apart.

Our bodies are all interwoven. And so same thing with the church, with the Christians. But in spite of this supernatural unity,

Paul warns that if we're not careful, sin can creep in and it can be like a cancer, something that steals that peaceful relationship that we can have with other believers that we can't have with unbelievers.

So in Ephesians 4, Paul writes this about the impact of sin and the necessity of guarding this wonderful unity that we have.

Paul says in Ephesians 4, verse 1, Therefore, I, the prisoner of the

Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you've been called.

The word worthy there in the Greek means matching, so coordinating. So like if, you know, if you go outside and you look down and you've got two different socks on, because when you got dressed this morning, you know, in the closet, it was dark and you grabbed two socks and you look down, you think, oh, they don't match.

The Christian, people shouldn't look at our life and say, you don't match with the calling.

So there's this astonishing call from the offended king, who at terrible cost to himself has become your friend, and you've been called by this holy king to walk with him and by him and for him.

Right, so that's true. So let the life begin to match that. So he says,

I implore you to walk worthy or matching the calling with which you've been called with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

Wherever we look in relationships, sin promises us just endless happiness.

You know, you deserve happiness. This person will make you happy and you can try to use that person, a person in church, you know, you can use a spouse, you can use kids, you can use neighbors, co -workers, you can even try to use

God to make you a better you. But when you do that, selfishness destroys and living for self is against your great happiness.

Yeah, we can keep going on. I mean, just look at the types of masters, the results of serving

God versus serving sin. God being the good master, if we obey and we follow what he says, there are great rewards.

And we tend to look at this and say, oh yeah, the great rewards, that's heaven. And that's true. But there are present now rewards for following God, for being faithful.

But look at sin as your master. As you've mentioned a couple of times already in the podcast, when we obey sin and when we follow the call of sin, if we want to say, it never, it has never and it will never deliver.

All of it is false advertising, as we mentioned at the very beginning. It takes away so much more than it even can promise to give you.

It takes away your dignity. It can make your work something that you at one point loved and make it an absolute misery.

You know, Genesis 3, 17 through 19, the curse, where we will toil and work and we'll eat the bread with sorrow.

And even the best things, the things that everything you hear in the world says will make you happy, will bring you satisfaction, will become empty.

I mean, if we want an example, look no further than Solomon. Solomon gave himself to try everything under the sun.

And what does he end up saying? Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. If you think about sin as a master and you think of kind of a paycheck coming from serving the master, what, you know, one of the clear expressions of sin's true nature is the way it pays us.

So here's a man who has lived his life for self, selfishness. What's in this for me?

And he sacrificed everything to this. Sin has demanded that he sacrifices marriage. He does.

He sacrifices his relationship with his children. He does. He sacrifices his time, his health, his job, his friendships.

He sacrifices, you know, the happiness of his soul. He sacrifices his relationship with God, all for self.

And at the end of life, it pays him with the paycheck of death. But not just at the end of life, but every day leading up to that.

Well, we need to bring our short series on the nature of sin to an end by saying that it really is worse than anything that we could say, no matter how many podcasts we spent on it.

And yet, one of the shocking things about the sinner, about all of us, apart from the work of Christ, is that we are not afraid of that contagion.

Here's a disease that destroys us inwardly and outwardly. It destroys us. It destroys every relationship. It destroys us eternally.

And we don't avoid it. We seek it. We plan to get more of it.

We know it hurts us. We know it hurts the people we love, but we're willing to risk it if only we can get what it promises us.

But at the end of a life of touching slavery, it gives us death. Not only are we happy to be infected with it, but we're even happier when we spread it around and when we get other people to enjoy it with us.

Paul says just as much in Romans 1 .28. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge

God any longer, God gave them over to depraved minds to do the things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil.

They're full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. They are gossip, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful.

And this is it. And although they know the ordinance of God and those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.

Yeah, one example of sin's thorough influence, its universal ruin, is that when you contrast the response of humanity to sin, a much greater disease than any physical disease, we contrast our response to that to the coronavirus recently.

So who could have imagined a couple of months ago, almost the entire world just shutting down? Every continent, every country, people just shutting down and being forced to stay home for the sake of safety.

If there were a virus that didn't kill just a portion of humanity, but was guaranteed to destroy every person that got it, and that it was fatal if not treated in every instance, and it destroyed the body, it destroyed the mind, it destroyed the soul, it destroyed the relationships, then surely we would expect that the world governments would say, stop everything, everyone get home, isolate yourselves until we can find a cure for humanity's problems.

But instead, living for self -sin has been promoted by governments, has been promoted by parents, has been promoted by every one of us in our friendships.

You know, you deserve what you want out of life. You don't really need to listen to what God says.

And it's an astonishing picture of sin's thorough influence. You know, John, the fact of the matter is, we all have that disease.

Every one of us, we not only have it, but we spread it. And we all know from the very religious to the completely irreligious, we all know that sin will kill us all in the end.

And that sounds like it's really hopeless, because it is, unless you go to the right doctor for the right treatment.

We talked about that just last, or a couple of weeks ago, where we discussed the importance of having the right diagnosis and going to the right doctor.

And it's this, God sent his son to destroy the works of Satan.

To destroy sin, to destroy death. And he overpowered all of them.

He came to save us, and in so doing, kill sin.

Henry Law, an old writer from the 19th century, was a contemporary of Charles Spurgeon, wrote a fantastic, fat book called

Christ All in All, where he looks at images of Christ from the first five books of the Bible. He said this,

Sin is a monster, which has many forms, and each form has many hands. Each hand deals wounds, and each wound is death.

It touches to destroy, but for each wound, help is prepared. Jesus appears, all powerful, to heal.

There is, and we have to remember this, there is a seriousness with sin that will destroy.

But Christ is more sufficient, and he is more able and more willing to heal than sin is to kill.

How would you answer the question, who is God? Would you focus on what he offers? Would you focus on what he promises?

In Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, Dr. John Snyder answers the question by focusing on God's attributes.

The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook that participants complete at home in preparation of a small group study.

Each small group session is led by a video that has three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you are studying that week.

Second is a sermon from Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany. Lastly, are interviews from contemporary

Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more or to see what others say about Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit

Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description below. Well, we want to close with another prayer.

This one is taken from Richard Baxter, really one of the chief Puritans, 17th century.

If John Owen is considered the greatest mind of Puritanism, at least the latter half of Puritanism, Baxter is probably one of the most tireless laborers.

Baxter wrote a lot of works. This is volume one of a four -volume set called The Practical Works of Richard Baxter.

I don't know if you can see it, but it's a two -column page, which means nobody reads them because they're just such hard work.

I think there's about 30 volumes in Baxter's complete works. This is a prayer taken from Richard Baxter.

Oh, eternal God, our reconciled Father in Christ Jesus, reject us not, vile and miserable sinners, who, constrained by our necessities and invited by your goodness, cast down ourselves in humble confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgement of your mercies.

And we earnestly beg your farther grace. Oh, merciful Father of Spirits, have mercy upon us.

Forgive our great and manifold sins. Woe to us that ever we were born.

If you deal with us as we deserve, but we appeal to the blood and merits of Jesus, our

Redeemer, for his propitiation that freely pardons all penitent believers.

We are sinners, but he is righteous and has satisfied for all our sins.