The message today contains a section on debts, and the ways we sin against our duty to love others through a financial lack of love. This exhortation, and the confession that follows it, is a preparation for that message.
We have grown accustomed to identify love with a feeling, and from there, we have grown accustomed to a detachment of that feeling from what God actually tells us to do in our relationships with others. We have drifted so far that when someone displays an expectation that what God requires to be done should in fact be done, we are irritated by the legalism. Why can’t we substitute warm and honorable feelings for the burdensome duty of writing a check? It would be so much nicer.
This is the kind of dualism that afflicts us in virtually everything we do. Hypocrisy has always existed, but in our day we have institutionalize the mechanisms of this hypocrisy, and have organized ourselves corporately so that our internal self is always considered pure and undefiled, and our faults and shortcomings occur out in the external world, which doesn’t matter that much anyway. This is a great sin, and is a profound grief to the Holy Spirit of God.
Â
The Holy Spirit is given to knit us together, one with another, and in our day, it is necessary that He first begin with knitting together our internal man with our external man, our thoughts and motives on the one hand, and our actions and lives on the other. But He is doing this, for which we are grateful.