I Am One of Them!

Just finished my sermon prep for the week and I’ve grown accustomed to taking a few moments upon completion to just think and reflect on the sermon in my own life. Sometimes I pray, sometimes I doodle, listen to music, or contact someone that’s on my mind. This week’s sermon is over Mark 10:13-16, “Let the Children Come.” It has reminded of much about my own daughters and my responsibility as their father. With Father’s Day coming up this seemed providentially appropriate. But as I worked myself through the text this week I somehow ended back on the issue of sin. That makes three weeks where sin has been a major point or at least mentioned with some degree of importance. This week I was hit with the reality that as a parent I sometimes grossly undervalue the issue of sin. I desire to protect my daughters from many things in life, but sin itself often seems to get the least attention, I’m usually over-worried about the consequences of sins but not the actual concept of sin. I realize that I can’t protect my daughters fully because sin is in their hearts; their natures have been corrupted by their father’s sin, all the way to the first father, Adam. I cannot protect them from themselves.

And then I realized that those sins that I have been fearing most for daughters, like the sins of some perverted man one day taking advantage of my girls, is really not my primary worry. I read that 1 in 4 girls are sexually assaulted at some point in life, and as a father of girls that concerns me greatly. The world is a dangerous place! But what I’ve perhaps overlooked is that the dead sinful heart is in 1 of every 1 person and it’s even more of a danger. The heart of sin will destroy, is dead, perverted and evil, in need of redemption and newness of life.

That has reminded me of a moving song by Sufjan Stevens, John Wayne Gacy, Jr. I’m not an art critic or even a music critic but I believe Sufjan is a real artist with the ability to move you in profound ways that go far beyond the medium he uses. This song is a deeply moving revelation of the heart of every man, every person. That what I fear from the John Wayne Gacy’s of the world is really far less than what is in my own heart, in the hearts of my daughters, and in every person, that in reality “in my best behavior, I am really just like him, look beneath floorboards at the secrets I have hid.” That’s the harsh reality of sin that few can take. It’s far easier to look at the Gacy’s of the world and shun and believe that it’s impossible that such a heart could exist anywhere else but when we get to that place of honesty, we see that same heart in us. Dead and disgusting. And from there, the light of the glory of God revealed in the gospel of Jesus Christ is like ice-cold water on a parched dehydrated tongue. When we consider the reality of sin in that dark place, the light of the gospel is life. It’s not easy to consider such a sinful state, but it sure makes the gospel that much sweeter and beautiful. And that is what I must be giving my daughters. Yes, the world can be dangerous because sin is dangerous; it ruins and destroys all things beautiful. But there is hope in the midst of ruin, something to restore life and beauty, the gospel of Christ. Taste it, drink it, love it, and it will redeem life and this world.

I cannot protect my daughters from their greatest danger, their own hearts, hearts just like that of John Wayne Gacy. It is the heart that is actually worse than the heinousness of Gacy’s sin, the sadistic murders are simply reflections of the dead heart. It’s the unchanged heart that will send him, you, and me to destruction. I can only give my daughters that which has cured their own father’s heart. And in giving them that I bring them to the kingdom of God. Exactly where I want them to be, the only true place of safety and protection.