What’s Inside
When I look Closely
by Lisa Coleman
Good itself does not dwell in me. My default nature is fallen. The Law is a lens to evaluate my situation. While my house may appear tidy and put together on the outside, the inside reveals a different story.
As the writer Dorothy Sayers once said, “{Sin} is a deep interior dislocation at the very center of the human personality. The 20th-century poet W.H. Auden called sin “The error bred in the bone.”
So, what can one do? The Law serves to compel me to act on the danger inside me.
Fighter pilots can (and must) react immediately to rapidly changing situations as they operate $27 million war machines. When an enemy aircraft is closing in, there is no time to reason through the do’s and don’ts/pros and cons of the situation. They must rely on instinct – but not natural instinct. After all, natural instinct would be to run or rather fly away when you face danger in the air. No, they need instincts shaped deep within them through years of strict discipline. Countless little decisions in the cockpit must be automatic. But that doesn’t mean that they are involuntary. They are actually quite voluntary. The pilot voluntarily trained for them and in the cockpit, he reaps the instinctive benefits of that training.
Looking closely inside, we find our hearts and minds are under a regimen of beliefs and values that don’t align with Scriptures. What we put in our heads, voluntarily, becomes what is drilled into us. What we count as wisdom from other sources and what we accept as normal from culture shapes our unintentional sinful responses to life situations. We, as humans, do react to our world around us. We will do things we don’t want to and fail to do things we want to do.
Paul addresses this dilemma and the remedy as he sees it in Romans Chapter 7. Join us Sunday in class or on Zoom!
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You can download the Bible study materials for this session for your personal use and watch the Zoom video of the in-class session by following the links below:
PowerPoint Slides
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Follow this link to find other studies in this series: TRANSFORMED: Knowing & Doing God’s Will.
