April 19, 2020
For the Lord does not want the sinner to die, but to return and live. There is still time for endurance, time for patience, time for healing, time for change. Have you slipped? Rise up, Have you sinned? Cease. Do not stand among sinners, but leap aside. For when you turn back and weep, then you will be saved.
If you have sinned, do not go to sleep without repentance; for the lack of repentance after one has sinned makes the heart yet harder and harder.
How many have suffered and still suffer because their hearts were not firm in their good inclinations, because they imprudently looked with impure eyes, because they heard with ears unaccustomed to discern between good and evil, because they tasted greedily! The senses of the sin-loving, greedy flesh, unrestrained by reason and by God’s commandments, have drawn them into various worldly passions, have darkened their minds and hearts, deprived them of peace of heart, and taken away their free-will, making them the slaves of these senses. Thus you see how necessary it is to look, listen, taste, smell, and feel prudently; or, rather, how necessary it is to guard your heart so that through your outward senses, as through a window, no sin may steal in, and that the author himself of sin – the Devil – may not darken and wound that heavenly fledgling, our soul, with his poisonous and deathly arrows.
We can’t afford to be complacent about God’s glory. The fact is that putting your Christian life on autopilot is the same thing as “walking in the flesh.” When we become unaware, when we take something so precious for granted, our prayers become tedious, witnessing becomes dry, jobs become lacklustre, and relationships sag under the weight of selfishness. What’s worse, our communion with our Savior and best friend turns into a chore. The Lord Himself seems to lose vitality in our estimation; He becomes little more than a wooden icon in our hearts, a mere measuring rod for our behaviour—someone who purchased our salvation once upon a time, someone in whom we believe in a general, distracted sort of way.