Don’t Sin to Fix Sin
As a general rule, we don’t want to sin in order to fix sin. Where we are in such a mess that every immediate choice looks like something we ought not to do, we want to put right as much as is wrong (such as we are able) and to press toward what will lead to least sin in the end. We ultimately want to minimise sin, whatever that means in the circumstances.
Sin gets us into a right mess, doesn’t it? The messy situations we get ourselves into because of our sin abound. And trying to unpick messy situations that result from sin, when somebody is trying to repent and do what is right is also often difficult. What exactly do you unpick? What do you counsel? What do you try to put right?
A long time ago, when faced with a particular messy situation, one of my elders landed on a fairly solid principle. You don’t want to multiply sin. It can never be good to sin in a bid to fix sin. Whatever problem we may be faced with, however messy and difficult to untangle, the solution to it is not further sin.
As a general rule of thumb, it is solid. If the proposed solution to the problem before you is something the Bible tells us not to do, then it is no solution at all. We don’t want to increase sin and we don’t want to multiply sin. More sin to address sin is not the answer.
The difficulty comes when people get themselves into messes where something needs to be done, but any solution to make things right might, on some level, be consider sinful. Consider this example of somebody who professes faith, but then repented of the following sin, has had extra-marital relations with somebody who then fell pregnant.
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Pay Attention to What You’re Singing
We must not approach the worship of God for what it can do for us. This kind of idolatrous mistake is responsible for many churches losing their way with worship. The aforementioned benefits of paying attention to what we sing are simply byproducts of genuine worship—the benefits to the human spirit of encountering and rightly responding to God.
As Christians who live in a predominantly pagan culture, we regularly hear words or phrases that betray commonly held but false assumptions based in a pagan view of reality. We filter these out daily in nearly every context, from academic lectures, to media consumption, to conversations with family and friends: “billions of years,” “karma,” “follow your heart,” or even the kindly stated, “good luck.” Discerning Christians find themselves continually filtering what they see and hear through the lens of a biblically informed conscience.
Unfortunately, Christians often have to filter language even in church. How we worship God and what we say in our worship necessarily shapes our beliefs about God, just as what we believe about God informs how we worship Him. When you attend church, pay attention to what you sing, because what you sing will tell you a lot about what your church really believes. Just as a tree is recognizable by its fruit, a church’s theology will be recognizable by the way that she worships and the songs that she sings.
If you aren’t paying attention to what you are singing, you could be missing out on some of the richest spiritual moments of your life.
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The Reader, the Bible & His Presence
The magic of literature’s influence can only come to realization in the life of the reader when the reader leaves the book behind. This may be true of literature, but it is not true of the Bible. The power of Scripture resides in an abiding presence, a presence which is neither imagined nor sentimental but a presence which is none other than He who is the subject of the biography. The Lord be with you. And, indeed, He is.
Recently, I have been reading Terry Eagleton’s book, How to Read Literature. Eagleton is as entertaining as he is insightful. He reminds us readers, for example, that Heathcliff does not exist outside of the pages Wuthering Heights or that if Ishmael is only a literary name, then he doesn’t have a real one, because Melville chose not to give it. Again, it’s not that we don’t know it. He does not have it!
But it’s another observation that caught my imagination. He cautions a reader not to confuse fiction with reality. Certainly this is something of a danger for the best of readers. There are women who long to recreate the culture of Pride and Prejudice within their home school coop while wistfully wishing such a thing could be extended even further. This is not to mention the men who sneak the “thee” and the “thou” into their prayers.
Into this context Eagleton reminds us of Prospero, the hero of Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, who comes forward at the end of the play to caution the audience of making a mistake. Listen to Prospero,
Now my charms all o’erthworn,
And what strength I have’s mind own,
Which is most faint. Now, ‘tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my hands
With the help of your good hands.
What is Prospero doing? He is asking the audience to applaud. Certainly that is what he means when he asks for release “with the help of your good hands.” But he is not simply asking for praise. Prospero is pleading with the audience not to confuse the play with reality. Why? If they fail to do so they will diminish the effect of the play on the real world. In other words, says Eagleton, the spell must be broken if the magic is to work.
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The Testing Room
The Lord is with me. He had not abandoned me. He had not abandoned GraceAnna or our son. God is sovereign. He put me in this closet. He had put GraceAnna in the surgery room. He had prepared us for this moment. And He was with us. I realized that all I could do in this moment was to “wait for the Lord.” He must act. Whatever seemed good to Him would be right. His will for GraceAnna, our son, for me, and our family was all that mattered.
My worst possible fears played out before my eyes. My wife, GraceAnna, and I were in the delivery room for the birth of our fifth child. But this delivery would be different from the others. Our previous deliveries were relatively smooth. Textbook deliveries, you might say. Speaking of textbooks, when our second child, Evangeline, was born, I even studied for a Greek exam for seminary while we were in the delivery room (only in the early stages, I promise)!
Nothing would be textbook about this delivery. Our son had been breech, and there had been discussions about a possible scheduled c-section. However, he ended up turning into the head-down position on his own, and GraceAnna went into labor naturally at about 2 AM on a Sunday morning. Even though this was our fifth child, once we checked into the hospital, we were never able to truly relax. Maybe it was because we were older. Maybe it was because GraceAnna went into labor a week early. Maybe it was because it was our first delivery in North Carolina. But it didn’t feel like the previous deliveries. It never would.
After GraceAnna’s water broke, something disturbing begin to happen. Every time she had a contraction the baby’s heart rate would dip on the monitor. The first time it happened, it alerted the nurses and the doctor. That had my attention. “What could be causing the heart rate drop?” I thought. The doctor, seemingly reading my mind, explained that the umbilical cord could be compressed during contractions. So she asked the nurses to move my wife into different labor positions to see if the situation would resolve itself. Through all this, I thought to myself, “Should we just go ahead and ask them for a c-section? After all, I would rather be safe than go through a risky delivery.”
Code Green
Sometime later, the doctor came in and told GraceAnna, “I wasn’t comfortable with that last heart rate dip. We need to move you again.” When the nurses started to move her, GraceAnna suddenly felt very lightheaded. She told the doctor, nurses, and me that she was about to pass out. The doctor quickly asked for some meds to be given through her IV, which helped stabilize her. At this point, the doctor noticed that GraceAnna was bleeding significantly. Almost simultaneously, the baby’s heart rate plunged on the monitor and didn’t bounce back up. Everything seemed to be going wrong at the same time.
What was I doing during this time? I wish I could say I was sitting at GraceAnna’s side, calmly reassuring her. But instead, I was pacing the room, praying out loud. How could this be happening?
The next thing I knew the doctor initiated a “Code Green,” which is an “all hands on deck” signal for an emergency c-section. GraceAnna told me later that the doctor had told her, “Everything is about to happen really fast. But we need to get him out.” When she issued the Code Green, seven or eight nurses hurriedly entered the room and began unplugging the IV and all the other electrical cords. Though I didn’t know what a Code Green was at the time, I knew enough that it must mean an emergency c-section. The Marine in me kicked into gear, and I started moving all obstacles that stood between the hospital bed and the door. The doctor then came to me and said, “Everything is going to be alright.” I didn’t know if the doctor was just telling me that to try to reassure me or if it was because she meant it. I have seen too many war movies to know that sometimes you tell someone it will be ‘alright’ to calm their fears, even though nothing is right! There was no time to explain more. They then rushed her out of the room. It happened so fast that I quickly moved GraceAnna’s leg as she was going through the door so it wouldn’t hit the door frame. I knew we were in a serious moment.
The Testing Room
I sat down in the chair in the now empty delivery room and began to pray, but before I could pray for more than a minute, a nurse came and asked me to follow her. She took me to a very small room down the hall. It was so small it was almost a closet. There was a small sofa on one wall, and it faced a television maybe five feet away on the other wall. Underneath a small table was a mini-fridge filled with drinks. Against another wall was a locker filled with medical scrubs for dads to scrub up (apparently to go into c-section surgery). I realized that this little room was, as I have jokingly called it, “the daddy timeout room.” It is the room where they take dads awaiting news or needing to change to go into surgery.
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