STAY CLOSE
It’s often called a besetting sin. We’re all unique, and so we will tend towards differing bad habits or attitudes. Perhaps the writer to the Hebrews had those personal flaws in mind when writing about the ‘sin that does so easily entangle’. Besetting sins are deep potholes gouged into the pathways of our lives. It’s prudent to know where they are and steer around them.
Recently I did a risk assessment on myself. Looking back over my shoulder, scanning decades as a disciple, I asked the uncomfortable question: where am I consistently the weakest? The list grew alarmingly long. Pride frequently nips at my heels, and I’m prone to allow the stale taste of bitterness to sour my stomach. I don’t really struggle with envy – I find it easy to celebrate when others are blessed more than I am – but hailing from a cash-starved working class family means that greed might be an issue. There are others I won’t list, to spare you boredom and me embarrassment. But today I believe I have identified my premier, besetting sin. It is independence from God.
In my early days, I was obsessed with being in the will of God, and read every book I could find about guidance, having first prayed that I might be in the will of God and find the right book about the will of God. It was agonising as I fretted about whether to shop at Sainsbury’s or Tesco, terrified that I might miss the opportunity to talk about Jesus while reaching into the shop freezer for some basics fish fingers. It was all rather silly, and bad for my mental health. I felt like I was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with 10,000 pieces, and was quite terrified that I might fail in the process. And failure might mean – according to my flawed thinking – that I would live a second-best life, disconnected always from God’s best. The will of God, in my mind, was a tightrope, with me wobbling away a hundred feet up, and with no safety net to catch me.
So I did what we often do – I made a pendulum swing away from such neurotic practices, and took my life in my own hands. I talked about pendulums earlier, and this was another one of my reactionary moments. That worked out well, until my ministry impact began to expand. Opportunities to write and speak multiplied, and threatened to paralyse me.
And so, God gave me a clunky reminder to stay close. Attending a Christian leaders’ conference, I was invited onstage by Gerald Coates, who presented me with a bishop’s staff. It had previously belonged to Bishop Huddlestone, who fought apartheid in South Africa. I should carry the staff with me wherever I went in ministry, prophesied Gerald, to my annoyance. It would be a reminder to me to depend on God and not upon myself. So I did, for a few years.
Some thought I was mad, others a bit pretentious. Finally, the staff got lost in the bowels of a United Airlines baggage hold, and I thanked God... and forgot the lesson. Slowly, imperceptibly, the tentacles of independence from God began to wrap around me again.
We’d experienced some minor successes in buying and selling property; nothing to make Lord Sugar nervous, but we decided together with some partners to build a house. We’d sell it, and make a tidy profit. Kay didn’t want to do it and said so. I didn’t take time to prayerfully reflect, convinced her to come along for the ride, and just rushed ahead. We completed the house just before the mortgage short-selling crash. Just a few weeks ago, after ten painful years, we sold it – for half the amount we invested in it.
So now, because it’s next door, every time I come home, I see a monument to my foolishness. It is my folly, and one for which I will pay for many years to come. A folly is defined as a costly ornamental building with no practical purpose, especially a tower or mock-Gothic ruin built in a large garden or park. Technically the house is not a folly, because the people who live in it love it. But it is a folly to me; it was created when I ran ahead of God, ignored wise counsel, and now it stands as a substantial, permanent reminder of my hurried decision.
Independence is a subtle sin, but one that the Bible confronts. In his hard-hitting epistle, James rebukes those who just live as if their lives were not given over to Christ, and make year-to-year decisions, ignoring the purposes of God in the process. It’s all too possible, having given our lives to Jesus, to slowly, gradually take them back again.
In my case, carting a clunky staff around wasn’t enough to rid me of my besetting independent sin; it took a whole, unsold house to get this message into my thick head and sometimes hard heart. Without Jesus we can do nothing, so He teaches, but sometimes we still try. So today, let this be our prayer: Lord Jesus, today, stay close, especially when opportunity beckons, and it’s just thinly disguised independence. Amen. And Amen.