Sin is a thief and grace is pure gift. The former destroys and the latter heals. I’ve found that the destruction and harm sin brings, especially sexual sin, comes back to haunt us again and again. The only solution is the priceless gift of God’s freely given grace.
By Timothy Horst
23 May 2019
Sin is the thief that keeps on taking.
I thought I knew the destruction and harm of sexual sin, until I didn’t. I didn’t just make poor choices at the end of high school and early in college, I had fundamentally oriented myself in a destructive path. It messed me up for a while, and I was so close to taking a giant step even further into the blatant disregard for the dignity of the human person.
Grace is the gift that keeps on giving.
During my sophomore year of college, I began to open up my Bible on a daily basis. Then I started going back to church every Sunday, and I eventually worked up enough courage to make a tragically overdue confession. I later discovered the incredible God-designed beauty of sex and marriage, and was led to discern and follow God’s call to enter the seminary after college. After wrestling with taking the next step in my vocation, I left seminary after four years with so much gratitude for God’s providential guidance in my life.
Read more about how sin destroys souls.
Now, I am married to my best friend and God has blessed us with bringing into this world the most breathtaking human being that I have ever encountered. God’s grace has continued to multiply over the years, often in spite of my indifference, my laziness, and my brokenness.
Sin is the thief that keeps on taking.
The complexity of sin and grace is a theological mystery that I can only begin to unpack. Our God is all-powerful. As we can all attest, however, grace rarely blots out all of the personal effects that sin has had on our lives (on this side of heaven, of course). Sin’s damage continues to linger in our minds, in our relationships, and with the other people that have experienced a “ripple effect” of those sins.
The sexual sins that I committed in my younger years still rear their ugly head from time to time. Those choices forged my character and psychology. As powerful as God’s grace has been, the untwisting and reorienting of my mind, my desires, my character is still a work of grace in progress. Those sins ordered me more and more toward “lust” and desensitized my ability to authentically, selflessly love. My wife also has to deal with not only the lingering effect of my sins, but with the wounds that linger from her own past, too. The sins of our past, committed by us or against us, continue to take from us.
Grace is the gift that keeps on giving.
As we continue to grow in virtue and reshape our wounded minds, as we continue to receive God’s grace to steadily untie the knots and heal our wounds, as Celia and I continue to give help and support to each other as we come to know each other more intimately, God continues to gift us with His grace through the compassion and mercy that Celia and I offer to each other’s brokenness.
Christ calls us to a faith working through love, that we would be members of his body and, through Jesus, be conduits of his grace to others. God’s grace keeps on giving to our family as we continue to seek God through prayer, scripture, sacraments, and by being instruments of God’s grace to one another, especially as we encounter the wounds of sin.
Sin is the thief that keeps on taking.
But Grace is the gift that keeps on giving…keeps on healing…keeps on perfecting.
And God’s grace has the final say.
Tim lives in Michigan where he enjoys running, kayaking, hiking, craft beer, and going on adventures with his wife and daughter. He currently teaches Sacred Scripture at Divine Child High School in Dearborn, Michigan. Together with his wife, Celia, Tim writes about simple living, Christian spirituality, and family life at their blog, theminfam.com. He has received an M.A. in Theology and a B.Phil from Sacred Heart Major Seminary, as well as a B.S. in Health Fitness from Central Michigan University. He has plans to publish his first book later this year (2019) on the spirituality and practical implications of remembering to keep the Lord’s Day holy.
Sin certainly keeps on taking as the author clearly reveals. Sexual sins are particularly difficult to let go. since they give us such pleasure and are very seductive as St, Augustine so well points out. Grace will overcome it but not totally. Who is completely free of sin on earth? Temptations will be there off and on. Yet with a pure heart.GOD will grant us the grace to overcome our temptations. Once there is genuine repentance and confession, one needs to sin no more. At that point CHRIST tells us that our sins are forgotten. We need to accept it and be the new person we are.