At this point in our Lenten journey, I think it is time we stop, take a breath, and remember where we have been.
We started with Ash Wednesday, remembering that we are physical human beings made of dust, and that this is a good thing. Yet we were also reminded that we are dust in need of redemption (Psalm 103:14). This was the beginning of our Lenten journey.
We continued by remembering that we are journeying with a merciful God who desires relationship with us. This matters. It keeps Lent from becoming a depressive spiral. Instead, we walk with the God who is gracious and slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love (Exodus 34:6), who helps us learn why we are in need of forgiveness.
We are in need of forgiveness because, in addition to being merciful, God is holy and just and demands that sin be dealt with. Yet in His desire to be in relationship with us, He Himself bore the weight of our sin on the cross to restore what sin had broken (2 Corinthians 5:21). Part of this journey requires that we confess our sin. Our confession is corporate, but it is also personal. Not just “we sin,” but “I sin.”
In learning to confess, we also learn what sin looks like. Sin looks like the things we do that follow the path of destruction, but it also looks like the things we fail to do that allow destruction to continue. Yet we are not quite done with sin. The next stage of this prayer takes us from what sin looks like to the root of sin.
In this section of the prayer, we confess that we have not loved God with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We see that the root of our sin is disordered love. We do not love what we should in the way that we should, and this leads us down the path of destruction.
The language in this part of the prayer takes the first and second greatest commandments, what Jesus calls the sum of all the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 22:37–40), and turns them into a confession of our failure to follow them.
There is an old and biblical word that describes this disordered love. It is a word the Old Testament prophets do not use in English but frequently expose in their teaching: idolatry. It is not a word we like to hear, but it is what we are doing when we do not love God as we should.
And if we are honest, we love making idols. The people of Israel loved making idols so much that much of the Old Testament is a record of their repeated failures to love God by chasing after other gods. However, anything that takes our focus off God becomes an idol. God demands our ultimate allegiance, and when we fail to give Him this, we are guilty of idolatry. I am guilty of idolatry. You are guilty of idolatry.
There is no way to sugarcoat this without taking away from the seriousness of the offense. Our sin is a result of our idolatry, of thinking that there is a better way than the way that leads through the cross.
What is so dangerous about the sin of idolatry is that it can be so subtle we do not even recognize it. It is not just the golden calf in the desert. It is the quiet moves we barely notice. The small shifts of desire or loyalty that slowly shape our hearts. You likely already know the places where idols have taken root in your own life.
This is hard, heavy work, but we are not done yet. We have only covered half of the issue. We have failed to love our neighbor as we should. When asked who our neighbor is, Jesus makes it clear that everyone is our neighbor. Not only the people we like, but also the people society tells us to hate, overlook, or forget. Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44).
As we were reminded last week, loving our neighbor means doing for the least of these as if it were Christ Himself we are serving (Matthew 25:40). And in some mysterious way it is Christ we are serving through service to neighbor.
Sin distorts and destroys all relationships through disordered love. We love our way more than God’s way, and we love ourselves more than others. Yet we must never forget that we serve a merciful God who forgives us, walks with us, and through the Holy Spirit guides us on the path back to rightly ordered love.
Joshua Strickler 