#besetting sin

[segunolumide]

REASONS WHY THERE IS ZERO OR LOW SANCTIFICATION IN THE CHURCH, ESPECIALLY AMONG LEADERSHIP —Lesson 7D —CHRISTIAN LEADERS CANNOT STAND FOR THE TRUTH

SANCTIFICATION SERIES — Every Friday Friday 22nd November, 2024 (Released 23rd November, 2024) PART 1: REASONS WHY THERE IS ZERO OR LOW SANCTIFICATION IN THE CHURCH, ESPECIALLY AMONG LEADERSHIP Lesson 7D —CHRISTIAN LEADERS CANNOT STAND FOR THE TRUTH MESSENGERS AND MESSAGES OF APOSTASY 2 Thessalonians 2.1 – 8, Amplified Bible1. But relative to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (the…

[granonine]

An Excellent Oil

Psalm 141:3-5. Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips. Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practise wicked works with men that work iniquity: and let me not eat of their dainties. Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my head: for yet my prayer also shall be in their…

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

Same-Sex Love Isn’t Love; It’s Lust

God Bless you if you can follow the link and actually read the article. I'm not vested enough to actually make a payment to gain access.

What I can say is that lines in the sand like this obfuscate what really needs to happen in the mind of someone who struggles. I'm an unabashed heterosexual with more socially acceptable problems of my own - anger, for instance, and pride - I think higher of myself then I ought. These are just off the top of my head. I don't have a confessor Priest, so this is it; as far as I'm willing to go in a public space.

What I can say is that the desire for sinlessness counts for a lot, in spite of actions on the ground...

51 Have mercy on me, O God,     according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy     blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,     and cleanse me from my sin!

3 For I know my transgressions,     and my sin is ever before me. 4 Against you, you only, have I sinned     and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words     and blameless in your judgment. 5 Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,     and in sin did my mother conceive me. 6 Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being,     and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.

7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;     wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 8 Let me hear joy and gladness;     let the bones that you have broken rejoice. 9 Hide your face from my sins,     and blot out all my iniquities. 10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,     and renew a right[b] spirit within me. 11 Cast me not away from your presence,     and take not your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,     and uphold me with a willing spirit.

13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,     and sinners will return to you. 14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God,     O God of my salvation,     and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness. 15 O Lord, open my lips,     and my mouth will declare your praise. 16 For you will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it;     you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;     a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

18 Do good to Zion in your good pleasure;     build up the walls of Jerusalem; 19 then will you delight in right sacrifices,     in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings;     then bulls will be offered on your altar. -- Psalms 51

Incidentally, I think this Psalm is sung at every Orthodox Vespers service, without exception. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

And remember - this is a song written by a man deemed to be, "after God's own heart". (1 Samuel 13:14) After he has been confronted by his sins of adultery and murder.

Now, I don't know anything about the Homosexual community. Nothing. At all. And, honestly, I don't care to. That is the least interesting aspect of your personality. That is identifying you by your sin instead of by all the other many things you could identify as - an artist, a poet, or a scholar.

"I love my son. He's masculine. Does that make me lustful? Maybe a pedophile?"

"Don't confuse the issue!"

I'm not.

Protestants love to play games with the Greek words agape, eros, philia, and storge - assigning very specific definitions to each use. I heard once that the only use of agape outside the Bible was between a man and a prostitute. I do not know what some of these word games mean, if anything.

If I am attracted to others, but do not act on some of the baser desires that I might want to act on, does that still condemn me? Can I not have a non-sexual, emotional fulfilling relationship with a same sex companion? Is that not theoretically possible?

Do I not still love my son?

One must always be careful to not tempt fate. Sometimes the structured life of a monastic life might be what's required to temper the emotions; the voices; the Logismoi.

Obviously, monasticism and Protestantism mix like oil and water. Avoid Protestants. They don't even want to understand.

At the end of the day, we are not our thoughts.

We are not the Logismoi that harass and assault us. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can say, "no" to them. Thinking in this way has been liberating in a manner that I cannot express. It makes the struggle easier knowing that it's not the thought that condemns; but rather my attitude towards that thought - "Thinking about thinking", and the resulting action....

My hope for myself is that the, "no", gets easier with time.

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a Sinner.

[thedupshadove]

My masters pronounced me quick, but not studious. Personally, I don’t think highly imaginative people are ever very studious in childhood or early youth. How is it possible? The imaginative temperament sets one dreaming of wonderful results achieved at a remarkably small outlay of effort.

He's so Tumblr-coded

[chesapeakebane]

Not to be insane but. I am Thinking about John and Alecto and “you have not begun to see the horrors of love”. For God so loved the world that she gave her son magic to fix it. For John so loved the world that he killed it and brought it back wrong. I wanted you like a caveman wants fire, or the sun. She was a monster in a human suit and he made her worse.

[fieriframes]

[Allan about besetting sins last Sunday.]

[undefeatablesin]

I am home again after a trip from Hell Itself 💀 but so eager to Forget and just return to my scheduled wips!!! THANK GOD 😂⚰️ Altar and The Suggestions await me in the morrow...

[clonerightsagenda]

The votes are rolling in and wow we are not doing good huh

[lizardho]

Life Lesson from a Mormon Mission

I was called to "serve" in the Mexico, Mexico City North mission. It was a weird and unpleasant experience, overall, but I did have some takeaways from it that I appreciate still. One of them, the biggest one, arguably, was learning how to deal with bureaucratic red tape.

I was called to serve in an area near Huehuetoca, in a small farming neighborhood I'll call X. The neighborhood was a farming-and-construction community, and the ward was DEAD. 30 people still attending, and all of them were unpleasant. They had come by the unpleasantness honest - this was a community stricken with poverty and impoverished and overwhelmed people turn to vice. Ward members had secret sins that were eating at them, and they turned their shame into vicious criticism of others. Over a 5-year period the ward had gone from about 100 people to 80 to 60 to 40 to 30.

As missionaries, we were tasked with baptizing and converting new members; however, the area we were in was small and REALLY aversive to Mormons. The last companionship to spend time in the area had gotten into a yelling match with some Catholics and had insulted the chastity of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. As a result, they had been chased out of town by an armed mob of farmers, and the reputation of the church in that area had been irreparably tarnished to many who lived there.

As a result of this distrust between church members and other people in the area, it was a very underperforming area. My companion and I had been sent X because it was a "punishment area" where ineffective elders could be sent to allow better elders to focus their efforts in the areas getting results. I had been sent there for deliberate disobedience to mission rules - we were not permitted to be in the homes of single women alone, and I and my previous companion had blatantly ignored that rule to help some of the elderly widows in our area replace lightbulbs and repair appliances in their living spaces. This made me a liability, and I was sent to X. My companion in X was sent there because he was terminally shy - possessed by an eldritch, unknowable shame that prevented him from talking to others (honestly, it was probably autism).

We were troubled by a series of problems - ward leadership were stretched thin, ward members kept reminders of all grudges they held against other ward members, locals hated us because our predecessors had called La Virgencita a whore, and those locals who didn't hate us hated other active members in the congregation. On top of that suck salad, the area's housing organization made no damn sense and it was impossible to locate any building or residence without getting lost a lot.

Part of missionary work is we're supposed to set goals for how many lessons we'll have, how many people we'll talk to, how many baptisms we'll have, etc.

And part of that in our mission was our mission president's goal for our mission. He was a bureaucrat, a wannabe Elon Musk type - he believed he could just wave his hand and give orders and we'd all be so delighted to perform that we would just Do It, no questions asked. As such, he had set impossibly high goals for all missionaries. We were expected to have 25 lessons a week with non-members, and in all of those lessons we were expected to be accompanied by a member of the ward. Our ward had no members, the members it did have hated each other, and because the area was so impoverished nobody really had much time to join us in proselyting.

So, starting our Glorious Work and Wonder, we were beset by many difficulties. We were being monitored and policed closely by district and zone leaders, and we were being expected to meet mission standards. My companion, cursed with an alien torment in his soul (autism), was unable to manage the pressure. So we had a heart-to-heart discussion, where he expressed how overwhelmed he felt. I agreed that this would be overwhelming if we had to do it.

He was confused. The Mission President said we had to do it, so we had to do it, right? He's the one who tells us what's possible, if we fail it's just because our own faith was insufficient. I disagreed. Our MP had not been in the area ever. He was a self-congratulatory shitburp with no idea of what was-and-was-not possible, especially for X. So we talked about it and said "if we didn't have those goals, and our only job was to support the local ward, what would we do?" and I told my companion that we would do whatever that was instead.

We decided to focus on 5 things:

Mapping the area for future elders

Repairing relationships with active members

Seeking out less-active or inactive members(if you're ever baptized Mormon and stop going they don't treat you as a non-member, they treat you as a defective member) and trying to get them back to church

Whittling down the ward roster

Repairing community relations

Focusing on these things, my companion's concern as someone cursed by a need to follow rules (Autism) was - how do we report this to district and zone leaders?

Missions operate on a strict bureaucracy that we were expected to be accountable to. And I knew that, and he knew that. But what I knew, that he did not, was that this bureaucratic hierarchy was a sham. The mission was not prepared for this area to exist, and the rules we were expected to follow were predicated on a reality that was not here in the world we lived in.

So I told him I would handle it, and when the time came for us to report our weekly goals I lied. I said our goals were 25 member-present lessons with new people. The district and zone leaders both asked if I thought this was realistic, and I said,

"Yes!"

NOT because it was realistic, but because the actual answer to the question was not allowed: We were not going to teach a single non-member that week. Or the next week. Or even the week following. We had no intention of trying to bring anyone else into this mess until the ward could take it.

When they asked if I had any realistic prospects for those numbers, I already had a response prepared:

"Elders, do you doubt my faith? We prayed over these numbers."

And they balked, because they can't say that my divine inspiration was false because it would mean that anyone's could be. So they just fake smiled and let me do what I was gonna do. And we did that, week after week, for 6 weeks. In the meantime, we were talking to former members, tracking down members who had moved, mapping the area, and keeping score.

After 6 weeks, the transfer cycle ended. We got word that we were going to be staying together a bit longer. Good. Because now things were picking up.

We kept giving them fake numbers, pulling the same "this is my faith" trick, and then doing what needed to be done.

By 4 weeks, we had openly confronted all the priesthood holders in the area. We were kind, because we knew where they were coming from, but we were fierce, because their pain was not a valid excuse to lash out at innocents and made collateral damage.

By 8 weeks in the area, I had been able to give two separate talks where I was able to call people out directly, one-by-one. The three biggest factors in people leaving the church and not coming back had been spoken to directly. Feelings of resentment against us had been brought up directly, and equally directly we were able to shut it down (i.e., "Elder's, I told my employee he had to listen to you to keep his job and you STILL couldn't baptize him? You're the reason this ward will never grow!" "Oh, interesting, because I've got a tally in here of the number of people I spoke to this week who refuse to come back to church until you're dead. I wonder if you might be selling yourself short a little bit, or giving us too much credit for destroying this ward?")

By 12 weeks we were able to start reporting our actual numbers, and they were better than anyone had expected. By a LOT. Our goals were now feasible. With some direct attention, some external pressure, and some patience and service, the members of the ward had learned to work with us really well. It was beautiful to see.

By 18 weeks (my companion and I got 3 transfers together, it was amazing) we had baptisms, and the ward had gone back from 30, to 40, to 60. My companion left at 18 weeks and a new one came in, a go-getter who was gonna take the baton and carry it to the finish line. By the time I left, the ward had 3 baptisms, and had gone to over 80 members.

By breaking the rules and lying to bureaucrats I was given the opportunity to do real good. By using their own rules and norms against them, they were left defenseless to my ability to do what needed to be done.

It's not always so easy - for all their pomp and circumstance, the Mormon church has very little power to do anything real to me. They can all agree that I was Bad or Defective, and they can tell me that they all agreed on that, and they can all tell me that because they agreed on that their punishments have to mean something, but their pretend rules don't make a difference when people are doing the real work. The impossible standards of perfection held by people who can't see past their own eyes, their views of how the world would work if everyone followed their rules, their belief that their rules made them more effective, didn't actually matter to me. I knew that their rules were false to me, so I broke them. Openly, directly, to their faces, and I changed the world of that tiny congregation.

And while the world was changing, I knew that they wanted me to believe their truth come hell or high water, no matter the cost, to uphold the integrity of their desire for the world to work the way they're told it is supposed to even at the cost of my objective reality. They wanted me to ignore the hurting of real people, to ignore the real distress that was happening and the real needs I could see in front of my fucking face, to pretend alongside them that the fantasy of an ideologue could come true in their minds. They wanted me to not see what was happening in front of me so that I could pretend alongside them that something different was happening. So that I could pretend the insane dream of a man so distant from The Work he couldn't even pretend to remember what it was like was real and meaningful.

In his dream-the-impossible-dream world, where everybody is readily and excitedly awaiting the opportunity to be baptized, where everyone will automatically, willingly alter their entire lifestyle to conform to his own expectations of how they should live, where everyone is able to give up anything at the drop of a hat and be rewarded for it, and where the only permanent aspects of people's identities were the ones he liked, his vision was doable. But in the real world, where I was living, it was incomprehensibly stupid, and so detached from reality that actively trying to enact The Dream would have been harmful.

This story is about missions being stupid, but it is also about abstinence only sex ed. It's about tax-exempt churches. It's about cutting social safety nets. It's about pontificating about values and virtues online but never acting on them in a tangible way. It's about being so concerned with nostalgia, or with an impossibly idealistic world, or being so concerned with maintaining virtue, that you overlook the person in front of you. It's about getting so caught up in playing by the rules that we get paralyzed. It's about not getting anything done.

Do what it takes, even if it means disregarding others. Do what it takes, even if it means betraying the dream world you want to live in. Do what it takes, even if you know it's gonna make people mad. Because no matter how they feel, no matter how many delusional dreamers feel put off by your actions, you will have done more than their fantasies have ever done. Lift where you stand, change the lives of people you know, build your communities, and do it by giving them what they actually need. Do it by giving them what you can see is required, even if it's not considered worthwhile. Use your eyes to see and your ears to hear the humanity around you, and the carceral nature of the overly rigid "perfect" fantasy world can disappear for you too.

And, as always, read more Terry Pratchett, snuggle your cats and loved ones, be gay, do crime.

Love y'all <3

[mayasaura]

Anger was her besetting sin. We had that in common.

[thewordfortheday]

I have treasured Your word in my heart, So that I may not sin against You.

Psalm 119:11

How do I live a life pleasing in God's sight? How do I overcome sin that besets me?

The Psalmist treasured God's word in his heart. What did he do? According to Psalm 119, he longed for it, he delighted in God's word, he meditated on it, he rejoiced in His word and he took it to heart, treasured it in his heart. Why did he do all these things? He was constantly seeking to live a righteous life, and realised that only God's word could keep him away from sin.

He cried out to God for help. Let's make this our cry too.

Let's pray: Teach me, Lord, the way of Your decrees, that I may follow it to the end.

Give me understanding, so that I may keep Your law and obey it with all my heart. Direct me in the path of Your commands, for there I find delight. Turn my heart toward Your statutes and not toward selfish gain. Turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to Your word. (V-33-37) In Jesus' name, Amen

[theriverbeyond]

I feel like the prevailing fandom opinion rn is that Alecto Is Just Angry i.e. "implacable or unceasing anger" but I keep thinking about this quote and how John totally glosses over his own anger-as-besetting-sin while basically condemning Alecto's, and. hm.

idk. thinking about how Alecto's actual in text reaction (via Harrow) to her own death/remaking was more like... despair? disapointment? "I still love you"? something about how Alecto must have woken up after her death, unwillingly new and hurting with it and the only other thing left in existence was someone who was so angry that he killed billions of people and also the entire solar system just to try (and fail!) to prevent a few hundred (?) trillionares from running away. thinking about soul permeability. "She was a monster the moment you resurrected her, and you went and made her worse"

[granonine]

Regarding Iniquity in the Heart

Psalm 66:18-20. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me: But verily God hath heard me; He hath attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me. To regard iniquity in one’s heart is to look at, see, regard, look after, see after, learn about, observe, watch, look upon, look out, find out. The sense here is to…

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. --Romans 3:23

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. -- Matthew 5:21-22

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. -- Matthew 5:27-28

Same sex attraction isn't a sin. Engaging in certain sexual activities is a sin. The problem in our society is that we conflate the two, and, worse, view one kind of sin as worse than another kind of sin. That isn't the way God works. All have sinned. None are righteous. Sanctimonious self-righteous pharisees abound in our society; ready, in their pride, to point out everyone else's failures.

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. --Luke 6:41-42

For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.  -- Matthew 7:2

It's my thought that the sin of pride is a much harder sin to fight than the the sin of acting upon same sex intimacy. As the author of this post indicates, everyone recognizes homosexuality as a sin according to the Bible, ironically though, the most sanctimonious people out there have no clue that they are in as great a risk as those they decry because of their self important righteousness.

In the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11), what was Christ's reactions to everyone involved? Were the Pharisees confirmed in their justification?

Anyone who fights a besetting sin can relate with Paul in Romans 7:14-21 -

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.

I would argue that the sin, itself, doesn't matter.

Repentance, and the heartfelt desire for sinlessness does.

Lord have mercy upon me...

So, if you see nothing wrong with living a homosexual lifestyle, you have no good reason to be part of a Christian community. In fact, I would say you are probably better off outside of one. It will not help you, and will probably do you harm. On the other hand, if you find that you are unfulfilled identifying yourself by the sin that controls you, you need to find a healthy Christian community to help you in your struggle with it.

This interesting post popped up just this morning in one of my other feeds that addresses healthy Christian communities.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Much of the public discussion of Ukraine reveals a tendency to patronize that country and others that escaped Russian rule. As Toomas Ilves, a former president of Estonia, acidly observed, “When I was at university in the mid-1970s, no one referred to Germany as ‘the former Third Reich.’ And yet today, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we keep on being referred to as ‘former Soviet bloc countries.’” Tropes about Ukrainian corruption abound, not without reason—but one may also legitimately ask why so many members of Congress enter the House or Senate with modest means and leave as multimillionaires, or why the children of U.S. presidents make fortunes off foreign countries, or, for that matter, why building in New York City is so infernally expensive.

The latest, richest example of Western condescension came in a report by German military intelligence that complains that although the Ukrainians are good students in their training courses, they are not following Western doctrine and, worse, are promoting officers on the basis of combat experience rather than theoretical knowledge. Similar, if less cutting, views have leaked out of the Pentagon.

Criticism by the German military of any country’s combat performance may be taken with a grain of salt. After all, the Bundeswehr has not seen serious combat in nearly eight decades. In Afghanistan, Germany was notorious for having considerably fewer than 10 percent of its thousands of in-country troops outside the wire of its forward operating bases at any time. One might further observe that when, long ago, the German army did fight wars, it, too, tended to promote experienced and successful combat leaders, as wartime armies usually do.

American complaints about the pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive and its failure to achieve rapid breakthroughs are similarly misplaced. The Ukrainians indeed received a diverse array of tanks and armored vehicles, but they have far less mine-clearing equipment than they need. They tried doing it our way—attempting to pierce dense Russian defenses and break out into open territory—and paid a price. After 10 days they decided to take a different approach, more careful and incremental, and better suited to their own capabilities (particularly their precision long-range weapons) and the challenge they faced. That is, by historical standards, fast adaptation. By contrast, the United States Army took a good four years to develop an operational approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq that yielded success in defeating the remnants of the Baathist regime and al-Qaeda-oriented terrorists.

A besetting sin of big militaries, particularly America’s, is to think that their way is either the best way or the only way. As a result of this assumption, the United States builds inferior, mirror-image militaries in smaller allies facing insurgency or external threat. These forces tend to fail because they are unsuited to their environment or simply lack the resources that the U.S. military possesses in plenty. The Vietnamese and, later, the Afghan armies are good examples of this tendency—and Washington’s postwar bad-mouthing of its slaughtered clients, rather than critical self-examination of what it set them up for, is reprehensible.

The Ukrainians are now fighting a slow, patient war in which they are dismantling Russian artillery, ammunition depots, and command posts without weapons such as American ATACMS and German Taurus missiles that would make this sensible approach faster and more effective. They know far more about fighting Russians than anyone in any Western military knows, and they are experiencing a combat environment that no Western military has encountered since World War II. Modesty, never an American strong suit, is in order.

  —  Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

[delawaredetroit]

Yeah, these three Overhaul lackeys are teasers for Toga, Touya, and Shigaraki's backstories respectively.

"Some were tossed aside when they didn't mesh with society" - The guy with the eating quirk is a narrative parallel for Toga. They both had impulses from their quirk that were rejected by society. Toga was tossed out of of her home after she lost control. Even further, their quirk related impulses unchecked both became cannibalism adjacent in nature.

"Another was betrayed by a lover and beset with crushing debt. Not even allowed to die..." - Hear me out, Larceny is a Touya parallel. From Touya's point of view he was betrayed by the most important figure in his life when Endeavor chose someone else as his successor and Endeavor wouldn't look at him anymore. Touya paid the debt for his father's sins every day by having to live every day in a body unsuited to his quirk due to his father's attempts at eugenics. He wasn't even allowed death after Sekoto Peak and had to survive alone on the street.

"And another became the tool of some money-grubber. And when that pig figured out my fake gems were worthless..." - This one is a stretch, but Shigaraki and this crystal guy have a vague parallel of people exploited as tools by people more powerful than them. Visually, how this villain was using his crystal quirk looked similar to Shigaraki's growths that became so large they engulfed him in the final war arc. Shigaraki is a difficult character to parallel with ordinary heroes or villains because being groomed as a vessel of hatred to be body snatched to steal an ancient eldritch quirk is pretty far outside the norm.