Faith Venture

I’m starting another study of Romans. I haven’t spent time in the letter for many years. It is a guide to spiritual formation.

Socrates famously said, “Know thyself.” Paul begins his letter to the Romans (after the greetings and his bio) with a list of all the bad things that humans are capable of–and in fact do. I think every writing I’ve read by people who have seriously taken the spiritual formation journey have experienced somewhere early on the fact that they are capable of much sin.

The same happened to me years ago. And the images still live. I was deep in meditation and suddenly before me was every type of sin (well, almost all I suppose). And I was convicted of sins I’d done, sins I’d thought, sins that I was capable of committing. It wasn’t until then that God became the most real to me.

Paul must have written Romans out of a similar experience. First he became aware of the immensity of sin and how it separates one from God. Then he began the journey to God which led to the Damascus Road experience with Jesus.

As long as we deny that we do things that are selfish, indulgent, hurtful, we will never clear the path to recognizing God. When I finally got around to reading the Desert Fathers–those weird guys who escaped to the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the first couple of hundred years after Jesus–I expected tips on spiritual insight. What I found was a guide to how to overcome layer after layer of sin that separated them from God.

By the way, I sort of dislike the word “sin.” It is perhaps overused and can become “church speak” that might lose its power over people. I have not come up with a better word that will drive home the fact that there are things you do, thoughts you dwell on that separate you from being free to live in the Spirit.

In my other “life” of process control in manufacturing, there is a phrase you can’t control it if you don’t measure it. Well, in spiritual life, if you don’t recognize the things that separate you from God, then you will not have true communion with God. You’ll be like Adam, who knew God, but he didn’t live with Him.

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