There was a sermon on the radio the other morning that touched my heart and stimulated my mind. I love it when that happens. We tend to think that sin is a result of temptations from the outside to which we respond by giving in or rejecting. But Alistair Begg explained to me that sin – every sin – is an “inside job”. It comes from a hereditary diseased sinful heart full of evil and idolatry . Some people think if they isolate themselves from sinful people and sinful things, they can avoid sin. It doesn’t work that way. Without Christ, you could seal yourself in a space capsule; be projected by a rocket into an orbit around the earth; shut off all communication with those still on earth and sin would be right there in that capsule with you because it is inside of you. With Christ you can pass through this sinful world without sinning.
Psychiatry is an interesting field where the deep dark well of the human psyche is explored. At the bottom of the well is a layer of muck that when stirred can cause a human to do unspeakably evil things. Psychiatry is not an exact science with undeniable laws like physics. It is somewhat dependent on the moral values of the culture in which the person and his or her analyst live. For example, when I was a young boy, homosexuality was classified as a mental illness. As our society began to accept it as normal behavior for some people, it is no longer considered an illness. On the other hand, as our society has become more hostile to Christianity, the concept of sin is now diagnosed by some in that field as a “Christian neurosis”.
There is only one Physician qualified to treat the human body, mind and spirit from the lethal disease of sin. That person is Jesus Christ. When a Pharisee (a group who pride themselves on separation from sinful people and things) named Nicodemus visited Jesus at night, he began with flattery, but Jesus cut right to the heart of the matter – Nicodemus’ heart. Jesus told him that to enter the kingdom of heaven he must be born again. Then Jesus explained to him that it is from within us that the disease of sin exists. We are all born of the flesh, but to enter the kingdom of heaven we must also be born of the spirit. Our sinful nature with a diseased heart produces evil and leads to death. When we believe in Jesus and obediently follow Him, we receive a heart transplant (spiritually speaking). That new heart will give us power over our sinful nature and produce the fruit of God’s spirit instead. That new Spirit within us is not just a new human heart; it is the Spirit of Jesus that raised Him from the dead. We are born twice so we will only have to die once. (See the third chapter of John)