As we are going through this disaster of a time – make time to mourn over your sin. Stop and contemplate its horror. Meditate on how filthy our hearts are. Look your sins straight in the face and weep over them. Consider fasting to help you focus on your sinfulness. Pray that God would cause you to see the blackness of sin. Joel teaches us that when disaster like this comes upon us, we ought to mourn over our sin (Joel 2:12-13).

This current crisis should drive Christians and the church to mourn and repent. We should see one of our duties at the moment as mourning over our sin. In both Testaments this was often accompanied by weeping, wailing, grief, lament, fasting, putting ashes put on one’s head or a humbled posture and the wearing of sackcloth – a very itchy and course material.
Someone who mourns his sin is humble before God and fasts or wears sackcloth not in order to pay for sin like some sort of penance, but because it demonstrates that he knows he does not deserve God’s blessings.
When we experience a disaster, such as the current one, we should be prompted to consider the depth of our sin and to mourn over it. To help us to that end, here are seven reasons why should we mourn over sin. Some of these reasons were inspired by Thomas Watson’s excellent little book on The Doctrine of Repentance.
1. Our sin is worse than our afflictions.
The cause is worse than the effect. All of our afflictions come because of our sinfulness. If we think people dying of a disease is bad, we need to realise that sin is worse. All suffering should point us to the fact that sin is a terrible evil because it is because of sin that we live in this cursed world.
2. Our sin finds its origin in the Devil.
Those who revel in sin are children of Satan. 1 John 3:8 says “He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning.”
3. Our sin is an offense to God.
The Bible describes sin as dishonouring God (Rom 2:23), despising God (1 Sam 2:30), and cheating on God like a wife cheating on her husband (Ezek 6:9).
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The entire worldview of Karl Marx was built upon the idea of destruction. He saw world history as cycle of conflict between two classes: the oppressors and the oppressed (originally, the bourgeois and proletariat); and believed that this conflict would someday lead to a Utopia called Communism

Cultural Marxism is a modern adaptation of the social and political theories of Karl Marx. That’s why it is sometimes referred to as Neo-marxism. Marx lived over a century ago, so a brief historical orientation may prove helpful here. The industrial revolution changed everything in the nineteenth century. With the development of technology, the invention of machines, and the building factories, millions of people moved away from the country and into the cities to work.
Those who owned the machines and factories quickly became wealthy as everyone else worked long hours with low pay. Remember, there were no unions back then and OSHA did not yet exist, so life as a worker was hard.
Deep bitterness set into the heart of many workers and they began to despise the rich. This is called the sin of Envy. It is more than discontentment and even more than jealousy. It is when you see what another man has and feel the need to destroy it.
The entire worldview of Karl Marx was built upon the idea of destruction. He saw world history as cycle of conflict between two classes: the oppressors and the oppressed (originally, the bourgeois and proletariat); and believed that this conflict would someday lead to a Utopia called Communism (i.e., a state in which there is no private property, where men share all things in common, and where the workers own the means of production, thus having equal share in all the products). This was Marx’s dream, his hope, his eschatology, and he honestly believed that it would eventually come to pass.
Another prophetic voice of communism was Vladimir Lenin and he agreed with Marx on all but one thing. Rejecting the concept of eventuality, he began a violent revolution. The blood of the rich and powerful flowed. Even the blood of poor farmers soaked the soil as some refused to surrender their land rights to Lenin’s Bolshevik army.
Others, like Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong took the same bloody approach in an attempt to realize their Communist eschatology. To date, over one hundred million people have been killed in the name of Marxism or Communism and while the Christian might well grieve over such numbers, the Marxist does not because this is their means of grace. This is, in fact, their god and we shall explore that more fully in our next article.
Christian McShaffrey is a Minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and is Pastor of Five Solas Church (OPC) in Reedsburg, Wis.

We must continually go to God and men in confession and contrition. We must resist the temptation to give into sin and stop confessing it. Confessing and seeking to forsake sin is one of the means of Christian growth in grace. When we stop doing so, we have begun the first step toward backsliding or apostasy. It doesn’t matter how many times we may fall into the same sin, we must go back to the Lord and back to those against whom we have sinned in order to seek our forgiveness.

My family moved to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 1989 when I was twelve years old. One of the first things that I distinctly remember about that beautiful, little, secluded island was the fact that we could walk into a store, write our name on a ledger, and walk out with just about whatever we wanted in the store. I remember my dad and mom talking about needing to pay off their account at the hardware store every month. The owners and my parents both wanted to keep “short accounts.”
It was a peculiar and fascinating experience for a boy who moved there from a major city in which that would have never happened. The population of the island was small enough at that time for store owners to feel as if they could offer that service. Needless to say, it didn’t last long.
Within a year or two, you could no longer do so. It is somewhat tragic that this practice isn’t part of our culture anymore, because it serves as an illustration of an important aspect of our spiritual life. In the Christian life, we are—as the Puritans used to say—to “keep short accounts with God and men.” So, what do short accounts look like in the Christian life? Here are a few thoughts:
1. Confess your sins.
Believers are people who confess their sin. That is part and parcel of what it means to be a Christian. If a man or woman, boy or girl, never confesses their sin, they reveal that they do not believe that they are sinners in need of a Savior. A true believer is one who has learned, by the work of the Holy Spirit to say, “Will you please forgive me?” This is true in the vertical dimension of our relationship with God, first and foremost, and it is true in the horizontal relationships we have with others.
If we don’t confess our sin, we evidence that we are not sincere in our profession of faith in Christ. We must first confess our sins to the Lord. We learn this from Psalm 51 where David prays, “‘Against You and You only have I sinned’” (Ps. 51:4). Even though David had sinned against Uriah, Bathsheba, both of their families, his family and all of Israel, he viewed his sin, first and foremost, as that which he committed against the Lord. It was sin because he broke God’s law.
We too must first go to the Lord and then to others. When we go to others, but not to the Lord, we functionally act like the man or woman who goes to the priest in the confessional but not to God in heaven.
2. Confess your sins particularly.
The Westminster Confession of Faith has an intriguing statement about this in its chapter on repentance where we read,
Men ought not to content themselves with a general repentance, but it is every man’s duty to endeavor to repent of his particular sins, particularly. (WCF 15.5)
In short, we must never conclude that it is sufficient to confess that we are generally sinners or that we have generally sinned. When we confess our sin to God and men, we are to confess our sins specifically. We are to own the guilt of the particular sins that we have done. We are to examine our actions against the Law of God (i.e. the Ten Commandments) and confess the particular ways in which we have broken his law.
My wife and I try to teach our boys to do this when they have sinned against one another. We teach them not to say, “I’m sorry.” Instead, we seek to teach them to say, “Will you please forgive me for doing x, y or z?” We also try to do so in our marriage.
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