Schemes and anxiousness to sin

“a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil,”
-Proverb 6:18

Sometimes you stop before you sin. Sometimes, you stand there a moment, asking yourself if you really want to do that. You weigh the pros and cons and make a decision. Often, you decide to sin anyway.

Sometimes you just find yourself in a situation where sin is staring you in the face. There’s no pause there in those cases – you just sin or you don’t. There wasn’t a long internal debate, just, “Yep. That looks fun. Let’s do it!”

Sometimes, you can’t wait to sin. Sometimes you actually hurry toward it. There is something really scary about these times, but we do it. It’s scary because the truth of the depth of our sinfulness is revealed in those moments. We’re not just people who mess up every once in a while – we’re sinners.

It could be an anxiousness to lie about someone to get your own way. It could be to hurry home to commit fornication or look at porn. It could be wanting to get back at your spouse. It could be anything – anything your heart wants so badly that you are looking forward to it.

God hates it. It’s one of the seven things listed in this part of Proverbs that God hates. Honestly, we should hate it too. Nothing speaks so poorly of us than that hope and desire to be evil.

In a similar way, God hates it when we plot evil in our hearts. Maybe we don’t do it this time, but we are thinking it. We are coming up with ways to hurt other people. Sometimes, we come up with elaborate revenge plans.

These things should be terrible to us, but we have become so accustomed to sinning that we don’t think about it much. But God is perfect. He is holy and just, and He sees sin for what it is. It is offensive, and it is, literally, damning.

The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. Death! We deserve death for when we were so anxious to sin. We deserve death for that plot we had against our neighbor. We deserve to die for it.

But even though we deserve to die, God created a way for us to live in Jesus Christ. He came to earth and lived a perfect life. He did not sin, and He did not deserve to die. Of course, He died anyway. He was murdered upon the Cross for our sins.

We need to be honest here – we are guilty of offending the very nature of God. We can’t make it on our own. We need a Savior. He’s the only one that’s earned it.