Mortification Leads to Transparency

To be transparent is to walk with an undefiled conscience and pure heart. Walking in a state of repentence and mortification ensures such transparency, because both are predicated upon honesty – the one thing God values above all else in His saints. Dear saint, it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve failed or made a mess of your life; if you can this day accept sole responsibility for your sins, wholly take the blame, and say “I am the man” with brokeness and sorrow over your yet unmoritified passions, I tell you, there is no limit to what God will do in your life. Just be honest with Him, be utterly transparent. Own your sin, bewail your failure, cry out for God to make you more like Jesus Christ. I started down this path some years ago. I resolved to make transparency continually my heartcry and to be ruthlessly honest with God about my depravity. Well, things got a lot worse before they got better. The Lord brought a firestorm of trials and temptations into my life, and they began to peel off all the layers of holiness and security I had been clinging to. I was brought to utter ruin and despair. I told God that it was impossible, that the Christian life was totally impossible to live out. For refuge, I turned back to the onions and leeks of Egypt, if only to get my mind off God and my indefatigible wretchedness. Indulging in sin just made it worse, for as a wise Puritan once said, “Satan’s apples all have worms in them.” God’s Spirit was on me like a bloodhound. I can’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep as I lay next to my wife and children late at night. My life was beyond wretched and I was a perfect failure. Truth be told, I had suicidal notions; the powers of darkness took advantage of my situation and started injecting fatalistic thoughts into my head. When at last it became clear that God was not going to forsake me, grace to renew the cry for victory and purity suddenly arose in my soul. Some months after this renewal of hope, the Lord delivered me from all the strongholds, cleansed me completely, baptized me in Holy Spirit and gave me the authority to minister this truth unto others with the same comfort the Lord had given me. In addition, He showed me how to maintain the purity of heart and conscience by the practice of holy mortification led by the Spirit. This is God’s blessed order: He delivers, cleanses, fills with the Spirit, and then He teaches you how to keep the heart clean via mortification. One thing God showed me is that it is better to keep a cleansed home clean, than it is to always have to clean up a dirty home. Mortification in the Holy Spirit by the blood of Christ is the daily maintainance that keeps a cleansed home clean. Mortification is going to the throne of grace each minute of every hour of the day to fetch power from God to put to death the unchristlike deeds of the body and take captive the unchristlike thoughts of the mind. God’s will for us is perfect victory in these areas, all day every day. But He has made provision that if we fail, we have the immediate power of the cleansing blood of Christ that operates by true repentance and faith – by being totally honest with God concerning our woeful estate. In a moment, you can be restored and put back on the pathway of victory and led into deeper battles of mortification. The house need never get trashed; it can be cleansed instantly, as soon as a fingerprint smudge appears on a window.