The Enemy Within: Chapter 11 (Pt 2)

The result of studying God rightly is that He gets much larger is our vision of the world and life. Consequently, as God gets larger, we can't help but get much much smaller. In other words, we learn about ourselves by contrasting who we are with who God is.

Sadly, the seeker and emergent movements have become very adept at keeping God from their people. They exaggerate God's love to such a radical extent that the god they speak of barely resembles the God revealed in the Bible. The reason they do this, I think, is that the true God makes us feel deeply uncomfortable, which is one of the last emotions these kind of churches want people to feel.

In fact, this is the difficulty we face when we are seeking to kill our sin. Killing sin is done by seeing God. Seeing God makes us feel uncomfortable. Therefore, we don't kill our sin because we don't want to feel bad.

The decision is between killing sin in ourselves or feeling bad about ourselves. The humiliation that comes from seeing God clearly is "strong medicine" that withers and gives us hope against sin (128).

This is the reality behind 2 Corinthians 3:17 "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another."

However, when we behold God's glory the Christian's response is to fear God. This, too, is an unwanted feeling in all human beings. However, when we avoid the fear of God we, again, keep ourselves from another means of fighting sin because "sin can't breathe in an atmosphere of fear and reverence before God. It suffocates. Can you imagine your lust cheery and prosperous when you are on your face before a holy God?" (131).