Last summer while camping at Horn Lake in the Chilcotin, I dragged myself out of bed at dawn to go and photograph Whitesaddle and Blackhorn mountains. This pair of spectacular peaks tower to 3,000 metres above sea level. The early morning sun spotlighted the peaks perfectly and the lake was absolutely calm leaving a stunning mirror image on its surface.
I gingerly stepped into my boat with all the good intentions of taking the perfect picture but even this slight disturbance placed a ripple on the water. I gently paddled, trying to negotiate the boat out to a vantage point in the middle of the lake. The more I tried to be careful, the more waves I put on the water. I was ruining the smooth lake surface and the effect of the reflected picture I was after.
When I got out to the middle of the lake, I decided that the only solution was to sit absolutely still in the boat and let the water completely calm down. I had been practicing goofing off for better than two weeks so waiting wasn't a problem. I had all morning if necessary and it was barely past dawn. I watched as my waves slowly worked themselves to the shore. When they got there they ricocheted off the shore and slowly rippled their way back to the centre and then to the opposite shore and back. As long as I waited, about an hour I suppose, the lake never calmed down from my intrusion to the point of a perfect reflected picture. It seemed like the perfect picture was crinkled forever and I had no lake iron to straighten it out. Frustrated with my inability to do anything, I cranked the outboard and roared down the lake, completely slaying any remaining calmness on its surface as well as the perfect silence of the morning. Later in the day I began to reflect about the wave-wrinkled distorted picture and about sin and about me.
A long time ago I came to know myself as one who had sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. This terrible realization resulted in me responding to God's yes in Christ with a yes from my own heart, to God. For a long time, that was about the extent of it. I had accepted Christ, bought my fire insurance so to speak and all was well with my soul. It seemed like sin was almost past tense. It is only in the more recent years that I have begun to appreciate the present tense of sin and how pervasive sin is in my life. The longer in the tooth I get, both in terms of age and faith, the more I seem to become aware of sin's distortion in me.
This geriatric holiness movement of mine has proved most interesting. I have discovered sin is not something I can simply give up like I did smoking a few years back. Sin seems to be in my life like the ripples on Horn Lake. It just seems to continue to move back and forth across the surface of my being, causing the most damning wavy distortions. And try as I might, I just can't seem to iron it out, at least not perfectly. I hate sin, I really do. And yet I can't seem to stop being a sinner. Together with the Apostle Paul: "I realize that I don't have what it takes. I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up." (Rom 7:18-21)
"Something has gone wrong deep within me .." That's how pervasive sin is in me. It has become part of the wavy, rippled picture that is my life and I don't seem to have the iron that will take out the wrinkles completely. This pervasiveness of sin is what good Calvinists understand as a result of the Fall; a condition theologically termed total depravity, and God, along with just about everyone else who knows me, knows full well that I am fallen and depraved.
We are in the midst of March. Lent is ending and I'm anticipating Easter. It is a time when I wonder a lot about my life and the sin that seems so entwined in my being. George Whitefield at the age of 16 became deeply convicted of sin. He tried everything possible to erase his guilt through religious activity. He wrote, "I fasted for 36 hours twice a week. I prayed formal prayers several times a day and almost starved myself to death during Lent, but only felt more miserable." Serious self-flagellation of any kind is not of much use to me in dealing with sin. I say this because of the insight that I can do little or nothing about ironing the sin-rippled distortion from the picture that is my life.
But the Risen Christ can. Listen to the Apostle again: "I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different." (Romans 7:22-25) In this sin-crinkled life of mine it turns out God has the iron. It is the risen Christ who is the antidote for all the sin ripples that distort the picture of my life. Hallelujah! It's Easter.
