All you have to do

So you’ve sinned. You’re afraid, so you hide out. You don’t want your sin to be discovered. You don’t want anyone to know. Least of all Him, even though you don’t acknowledge Him, you don’t want to think of Him, you don’t want others to think that you think of Him.

You have this nagging voice inside you, telling you what you’ve done is wrong, but you turn away from it, and lose yourself in other sounds, noises really, anything that will voice-over the Voice, because you know, once again, that He’s found you out, that He knows all about you, even though you don’t want to know all about Him.

So you hide out, afraid of coming out of your room, afraid of being seen exiting the place of your sin, where you made unlawful deeds your companion. How do you know they’re unlawful? You just know, you just suspect they are. You’re not really sure, yet you are sure. You are cornered by the play between your faith suppressed and your doubt proclaimed.

You know the commandments in rough, and you know you’ve broken them in fine, probably all of them, in fact. But I’m telling you, though you should be afraid, what you should be afraid of is not what you think. Truth be told, we have all broken the commandments. Some of us are breaking them even now. It’s part of the human condition, but we all know, that’s no excuse.

Come out of hiding where we can see you, where He can see you.
Join the crowd. It’s certainly not lonely here. There’s so many of us, so many law-breakers, so many who have broken them, broken them all. Yet among us there is not even one who is lawless, not even one who is clothed in shame and guilt. Here, take a look.

The only One of us who has never sinned, who has never broken a commandment, not even the smallest, He is among us, He’s somewhere in this mighty throng. Actually, look a little more closely. He is not only among us, He’s all over us. Do you see anyone naked here? Do you see anyone weighed down by a burden too heavy to carry?

He has clothed us in Himself. Yes, the One who you’ve been tormented by, that Voice is His. I think you knew that, but you might’ve been hoping it was just an hallucination. I did too, once. Then I took the Voice at face value, finally. I found that behind the Voice there was a face, and when I saw that face I was surprised that it wasn’t angry.

Back to brass tacks. Yes, you’ve sinned, you’ve been sinning, and sinning all along hoping that no one would notice, especially hoping that He wouldn’t notice, trying to talk yourself into believing that He isn’t really there at all, that the Voice is an illusion. I’m here to tell you, Uh-uh! The Voice is no illusion, and Yep! Your sins are every bit as real as mine.

This game of hide and go seek has to end now, but only you can end it, and it can only be ended by going to seek. This is no time to put it off till tomorrow. Can you really keep on in this way, doing what you know is wrong, knowing there’s nothing you can do to change it? Well, you know there is something you can do, but that would take too much effort.

You know you’d rather pay the price in cash to get rid of this load of guilt, but that’s not an option. The price has to be paid in blood, and you’d be happy to pay it yourself, but you don’t want Anyone else paying it for you. You think you’d be happy to pay it yourself, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. It isn’t as though you could ever pay the price in blood, on your own.

But give it a chance. If you really want to pay the price in blood, to pay up like a man, then the first thing you’ve got to do is let that Other One pay the bill in full, yes, pay it in full with His blood. After you let Him do that, He’ll give you all the chances you could ever want to make good your debt. It won’t rob you of your manhood to let Him pay, it’ll give you a manhood you never could have had on your own.

Isn’t it about time you come out of your hiding place? Find out what the purpose of the Law really is? What the commandments are there for? How you can hear the unchanging Voice say a new word to you, after you have changed your mind? Remove the imaginary line between you and happiness. Acknowledge both your fears, that you sin and that He is real, and transform them into faith.

Remove that imaginary line. That’s all you have to do.