http://www.palau.org//articles/dealing_with_sin_ Article from Palau.org Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:27:53 -0800 © 2009 Luis Palau Association en-us webmaster@palau.org (Webmaster) http://www.palau.org//articles/dealing_with_sin_ http://www.palau.org//articles/dealing_with_sin_
Instead, Staton recorded his own slaying in what one prosecutor called "twenty-three minutes of murder." Paul Wolf, twenty-one, was charged with Staton’s murder. The tape conclusively revealed that Wolf committed the murder. But he pleaded innocent to the slaying!

Wolf’s attorney explained to the jurors that his client was innocent because he was "legally insane" on the day of the killing. He explained that Wolf had suffered a difficult childhood with a mentally ill mother and a hard-driving father, then faced an ongoing series of custody problems after his marriage to Staton’s ex-wife.

The attorney explained that Wolf did not plan the killing, but was forced to slay Staton "at the last minute after the steady, lengthy, continual buildup of the pressure."

Such lawyers fill our court records day after day with excuses for their clients’ actions. But no matter what the courts decide, such men and women must live with their heavy burden of guilt.

In our society, some lawyers and psychologists have tried to replace personal responsibility and sin with scientific-sounding explanations for wrongdoing. Whatever happened to sin?

O. Hobart Mowrer, a noted psychologist, stated: "For several decades we psychologists looked upon the whole matter of sin and moral accountability as a great incubus, and acclaimed our liberation from it as epoch making. But at length we have discovered that to be ’free’ in this sense, that is to have the excuse of being ’sick’ rather than sinful, is to court the danger of also being lost."

Another noted psychologist, Rex Julian Beaber, said this: "The force of evil has disappeared from nature; sinfulness is no longer man’s fate. The new ’sciences’ of sociology, psychology and psychiatry have cast aside such concepts as will, will power, badness, and laziness, and replaced them with political and psychological repression, poor conditioning, diseased family interaction, and bad genes. One by one, human failings have been redesignated as diseases."

Beaber counters this modern trend by stating, "Ultimately, we must assume responsibility for our actions." Sin must be rediscovered once more in our generation.

If you scratch under the surface, most people carry burdens of guilt nobody else knows about. We hide this guilt as a skeleton in the closet of our souls. At the advice of our psychiatrists, we deny its existence. We explain it away. We repress it. We do anything but admit our failure. Ironically, until we make such an admission, our closet full of guilt will continue to haunt us.

Rudyard Kipling said it well: "Nothing is ever settled until it is settled right." We can point the finger and make up excuses, we can invent arguments and do anything else we want to do, but the key to the closet jingles in our pockets until we settle matters right.

Proverbs 28:13 says, "He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy." In a day of permissive dropout, cop-out, rip-off, and let-yourself-go, we need to learn the foundational principle of all mental, social, and spiritual health. We need to learn to confess and forsake our sins in order to experience forgiveness.]]> info@palau.org (Luis Palau) Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:27:53 -0800