Sin & its aftermath

I love it when one stumbles across a gem. I found the Tenth Leper blog through a friend because of the recent Rob Bell unpleasantness, but I've kept him in my feeds now that his reviews are done because I really like the stuff he has to say. Take this from today's post:

I think some of Satan’s biggest victories against us are not in his getting us to commit a particular sin, but in increasing our guilt over it. It’s like that old proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Similarly, get a man to sin and you’ll separate him from God for a moment. But get a man to feel guilty, and you’ll separate him from God forever. Guilt causes us to believe that God doesn’t want us, that his arms aren’t open to us, that his attention can’t be grabbed except by maybe extreme effort. It causes us to believe that we’re damaged goods and that God couldn’t possibly still want us.

I don’t think it’s too bold to say that the moments after sin can be more dangerous than the moments before it. How you respond to sin is so important. Will you move further away from your only source of life and help as a result of it? Or will you move closer to him? We need to preach the Gospel to ourselves every day because we sin every day, and the more we sin, the more we’re reminded that on our own we have absolutely no right to speak with God. But we need to let that drive us to Jesus as our only right to be in the presence of God. Jesus killed sin’s guilt. And because there’s no longer any guilt or condemnation for God’s children, then sin’s power begins to diminish in their lives, because they’re confidently running to their Father for strength.

Where do you run?