The Lord showed me several years ago that the root of all sin was actually a fear that we all carry. Many people have listed this root as pride or selfishness, but the Lord told me that the problem was much deeper.
Here’s some background.
When I was twenty years old, I was without a job for three months leaving me much free time. I was also attending a new church and I had opportunity to share my thoughts and opinions every Sunday morning during Sunday School. I, in pride, wanted to impress the others in my class, so I started using my free time during the week to go over the next weeks Scriptures. I would simply read the Scriptures and write down all of my thoughts. We were reading from 1st John which allowed the Lord to use that study time to infect my thoughts with His own, about love and living in Him.
It suddenly occurred to me that all of the sins I had consciously fought with most of my life had vanished.
By the end of this three month period, it suddenly occurred to me that all of the sins I had consciously fought with most of my life had vanished. I was clean in conscience and behavior. The sin left in me was that of pride, though I was unaware of it. Once I saw the pride issue I hit a downward spiral, slipping back into every sin that I had found freedom from and came under condemnation. The Lord was dealing with me about the pride so that I would come even closer to Him, not slip away. When we start to reside in His presence, day in and day out, God will bring to the surface all unresolved issues that would steal us from His love. But, shame and love are contrary to each other, so instead of yielding to that love, I accepted shame from the enemy. This is the power that sin has, it brings us back under shame, reminding us continually that we are failures. But God’s love and grace is much greater then the bondage of shame. We must learn to stay in His love even when we find ourselves falling short again. In this way we will find that the power of shame is broken. I ended up stayed in this state of failure for close to ten more years, when I finally decided to try this experiment again.
This experience of freedom, plus my study of 1st John, led me to a deep revelation, intimacy with God will break the power of sin. Yet, at the time I was still unsure how. In fact the Lord told me during those few months, “Everything comes from relationship.” This phrase locked me into a pursuit to understand what it truly meant.
When I restarted the experiment to see if time with the Lord would cure sin, I had already developed a strong ability to hear God through the still small voice. I had only just begun to listen during the first experience, but now I knew I could hear Him and I knew how. The first thing I had to deal with now was the shame of having fallen into pride so many years before. This shame had manifested all these years in an irrational fear that one day God would cast me aside, so now I was afraid to approach Him on intimate issues. He dealt with this issue of shame by taking me to two separate Scriptures, one in the Old Testament and one in the new, where two distinct stories were unfolding with eerily similar plots. Both involved a miracle by a man of God, followed by a second miracle that produced a response of, “Leave me, I’m a sinner.” Seeing these two stories side by side, I knew definitively that I was hearing God, so I asked, ”What are you trying to show me?” His response immediately moved me to overwhelming emotion and tears, followed by an hour of intense worship and thankfulness. He told me, “I was chasing them, and I’m chasing you.”
Remember that I started this teaching by saying that the root of all sin is a fear. It was a couple of years after that powerful encounter that I was preparing a message about the possibility of living without any sin that He spoke this to me. The fear that we all carry that drives us to sin is a fear that we are not valued or important. Let me illustrate this idea. Research, even by secular psychologists, has revealed that the most proud persons deal with the greatest levels of insecurity. This insecurity drives them to extreme levels of self promotion. But we can clearly see that pride is always just a mask to cover up these feelings of insecurity or fear that we are not significant. The same is true of selfishness. A man only needs to be selfish because he feels that no one else will show him love. It is now easy to see that under these two issues is the real root, the fear of not being valued. 1 John says that perfect love cast out all fear.
“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has to do with punishment. He that fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18 NKJ
As you can see, experiencing the love of God cast out the fear that drives sin, thus delivering us from sin itself. Look at this verse.
“Anyone who continues to live in Him will not sin. But anyone who keeps on sinning does not know Him or understand who He is.” 1 John 3:6 NLT
This verse is not actually talking about our salvation, but the depth of our personal interaction. Jesus died, not to just get us to heaven but, to get heavens realities into us. The main point of this purchase of our souls is to get us to the place where it is now easy for us to know Him. Paul talks about Jesus’ ministry of reconciliation. He says that the Spirit we received causes us to cry out for our Daddy God.
But my problem is that I am never satisfied with partial answers. You might be wondering how this is partial. When we come to Him, His love drives away the fear that causes sin; simple right. But there is still the issue of why we don’t want to come to Him. See, I have preached this for years but few have been able to respond in faith. So what is it that keeps us from believing His love or coming to experience it or even hearing His voice?
Recently I was praying about this issue and I asked Him to help me understand what the sin nature is talked about in Romans chapter 7. He told me that the sin nature is independence. This makes sense to me since earlier this year He had told me that the law is our attempt to be like God, without God’s help. So as you can see God was pointing to the divide between us and God as the real problem. Remember that Christ came to reconcile us to God. In fact every place where God defines the new covenant that He was establishing through His Son, He mentions that one of the purposes of the cross is to enable us to know Him (see Hebrews 8). The Lord had even told me many years ago, “It isn’t sin that causes separation, rather it is separation that causes sin.” Now, I realize that sin causes us to separate from God, but God was revealing that He doesn’t stop loving us or knocking on our hearts when we sin. Jesus, God in man form, didn’t cringe to be around sin, even though He was holy. You may be thinking about God’s turning away His face from Jesus while He was on the cross. Many ministers have preached that it was because of God’s holiness that He looked away. But, Hebrews 2:17 says that Jesus had to become like us in everything, including the pain of shame and the feeling of being separated from God. What the Lord was showing me about separation was that when we sin, we don’t have to feel condemnation or shame, but instead we can immediately turn to Him and find that He still loves us.
Here is what He told me this week. All of these things: (the fear of not being valued; our sin nature is independence; living under the law is our attempt to be like God, but without God’s help), all these are held in place and enforced by the reality and awareness that we have fallen short of the glory of God, we are flawed, and we seem to continue in this flawed state even after salvation. This subconscious awareness produces a flight response, a desire to hide, or a desire to cover our flawed-ness, our nakedness. We are actually experiencing a shame for our human condition. This is not the same type of shame one experiences after being humiliated, or even defiled by another. This shame is different, it is at the very root of who we are, continually suggesting that we deserve to be rejected, we deserve to be dismissed. It is a direct result of the sin nature and is also the bondage that keeps the sin nature in place. It is a defilement that seems to exist at the very core of who we are.
In Genesis 3, we discover that immediately after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve become aware of their nakedness and were ashamed. They were not ashamed of there sin, but rather of who they were. The word shame actually means, “to cover.” And this is the very first response to the sin nature awakening in them. “I need to cover this up, lest I be rejected for it.” In Exodus 19, we find the Israelites having a similar response. They are offered a priesthood, but they turn it down for fear that God would kill them. Then in Exodus 34, when Moses returns from the mountain they ask him to put a veil over the glory of God shining from his face. A similar veil ends up covering the Ark of the Covenant and the glory of God that was resting there. This veil was also covering the mercy seat of God. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 3 that this veil is still there, now covering the hearts of people, blinding them to the reality of God’s love for them.
This veil is shame. In verse 16 Paul tells us that God takes this veil of shame away when we come to Him. His love removes the feelings of unworthiness, of failure, of still feeling like a worthless sinner. His love draws us in and says, “It is alright, I still want you”. Turning to Jesus removes the veil. While we gaze upon Him the veil fades away as we see our value to Him, our acceptance by Him and His passionate unending love for us. Fear has no power against that vision.
When dealing with this myself, I asked the Lord about my feelings of condemnation and shame. He had me repeat many times, “My flesh does not want You, but You want me.” This one sentence confessed my shame, but it also demonstrates the depth of His unquenchable desire for me. It dealt with the shame, but without letting me hide, it drove me into His embrace. When I realized that underneath every impulse and uncontrollable drive to sin was this feeling of shame (not shame for the sins, but shame for my humanness, my fallibility), I then gained the power to despise the real problem. I now can come to Christ even if I feel ashamed, knowing the feelings of shame are a lie, and God won’t reject me, but rather, He will love me past the shame. So, I actively pursue God, especially when I feel worthless or like a failure.
“My flesh does not want You, but You want me.”
God wants you. Are you going to let a lie about your value, stop you from experiencing a love that will forever fulfill you? Or are you going to despise the shame for the joy set before you? Are you brave enough to come? Or, will you let these feelings continue to control your life?
I leave you with Ephesians 3:
“I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” Ephesians 3:16-19 NLT
