As we ready ourselves to confess our sins, it’s easy for a self-evaluation to trick us into confessing all the wrong things. Think of those funny mirrors at the carnival that make for some good laughs. What would I look like with short stumpy legs? What if my head quadrupled in size? Those mirrors deliberately distort reality. What is small becomes big, the wide is narrowed, the short becomes tall-ified.
Self-evaluation of sin can sometimes be like that, if you look into a mirror of your own making. Really bad sins are easy to spot. We can even obsess over them. We give them very spiritual sounding names like “my besetting sin.” But this can result in minimizing sins which are actually big but which we have conveniently slimmed down through the magic of convex mirrors.
CS Lewis, in The Great Divorce, makes this reality plain by setting two episodes in contrast with each other: a mother who, out of so-called maternal love, demands to bring her son down from heaven and into hell with her; and a man controlled by a lizard of lust. In the end, it’s the mother’s unyielding grasp upon her presumed virtue of being a nurturing mother that proves to impede her from enjoying the delights of everlasting life, whereas the lecherous man submits to the lizard’s destruction and transformation into a stallion that whisks him deep into heaven’s mountains.
All of this to say, “Do not let your eyes deceive you.” Rather, let the clear mirror of the Word show you all your sins; even, and most especially, your most admirable sins. Your presupposed virtues must be crucified. Your best attributes must be yielded up. Your merits you pride yourself in are to be repented of. This is what it means to truly humble yourself.
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