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This article is a little more conceptual, so it may not seem as directly dating related. However, it’s information that will make your dating life way easier than it would have been otherwise.
I think, as Christians, we all know that sin is ultimately foolish. That, eventually “crime doesn’t pay”. That, since it offends God, it is not worth it. Of course that knowledge seems a little less real when you’re in the present moment.
I think we have an unnatural fear of doing the right thing out of self interest. It doesn’t seem to matter to us that the Bible appeals to self interest to get men to come to God all the time. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that since God cares about our own well being, that we should care about it as well.
I think the main problem is an understanding of sin that is primarily statutory. We think that God just laid down a bunch of rules arbitrarily. Not that we would say that out loud, but it’s how we act. The problem of sin is that is “privation”, that it is lacking. The nature of sin is more like an act of exchanging 5 dollars for 1 dollar than it is driving over the speed limit. The 1 dollars worth of pleasure or safety that costs us 5 dollars of the same.
If you deliberately choose cowardice, you got a dollar of safety and lost five dollars of strength. Repeated acts of cowardice and you start to go broke spiritually. The same goes for neediness or any other behavior that gets in your way.
Now, the important point is that you don’t have to wait for it to cost you. Every time you act cowardly, the payment on your character is immediate. Almost no one ever does evil for its own sake. They always do it for the sake of some good they want to acheive. However if the goal is “goodness”, you always get a lot less “goodness” in sin than you would otherwise.
Every sin is foolish, not only later, but at the time. In my opinion, that’s why folly is bound up so heavily with sin in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
It may sound like it’s crazy to say that doing the right thing is easier on some level than doing the wrong thing. But definitionally this is the case. The trick is, do you want to feel right or be right? If you choose feeling right over being right, you won’t really feel right for long if at all.
So, don’t act like a fool, go with your judgement over your feelings, if you have to choose. If something feels right and is right, than that’s golden! Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not slamming on feelings, and I think it’s perverse to say that someone should go around feeling miserable all of the time. It’s just that your judgement will take you further than whatever passions are occuring in your body at the time.
Michael D.
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