hating sin

I am so very thankful our PFC giving was up to $1800 we received and this is a very, very special blessing. This weekend, I'll be going to visit John, my inmate friend, at Twin Rivers in Monroe and then attending our church missionary conference Friday night and Saturday morning and afternoon.

This week, the Lord used my reading in the Scriptures and events to show me the evil character of sin in my own life. There are layers of "garbage" all around us. As I was pondering the character of sin, I came upon this quote by Puritan Thomas Goodwin:

Hating sin

Work in your hearts a hatred of sin… If a man had killed your friend, or father, or mother, how you would hate him! You would not endure the sight of him, but follow the law upon him.

Send out the avenger of blood with a hue and cry after your sin; bring it before God’s judgment seat, arraign it, accuse it, spit on it, condemn it and yourself for it, take it to the cross, nail it there. If it cry “I thirst,” give it vinegar, stretch the body of sins upon his cross, stretch every vein of it, make the heart strings crack; and then when it hangs there, triumph over the dying of it, show it no pity; laugh at its destruction. Say, “You have been a bloody sin to me and my husband, hang there and rot.”

And when you are tempted to sin, and are very thirsty after the pleasure of it, say of that opportunity to enjoy it, “It is the price of Christ’s blood,” and pour it upon the ground. …

Shall I live upon that which was Christ’s death? Shall I please myself in that which was his pain? Shall I be so dishonest, so unkind, as to enjoy the pleasure for which he endured the smart?”

—Thomas Goodwin (1600—1679), Christ the Mediator in The Works of Thomas Goodwin (RHB), 5:294.