day no. 15,549: fair names to foul sins

"Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation; and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness." - Psalm 51:14

"In this solemn confession, it is pleasing to observe that David plainly names his sin. He does not call it manslaughter, nor speak of it as an imprudence by which an unfortunate accident occurred to a worthy man, but he calls it by its true name, bloodguiltiness... Do not give fair names to foul sins; call them what you will, they will smell no sweeter."
 -- Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening

People today are too busy having affairs to commit adultery or too caught up in getting something off their chest to spread malice. They're often too consumed with getting what they're owed to be envious or too empathetic to be effeminate.  When we call sins by fairer names, we reveal how serious we think sin is. Your senior prom was an affair. That thing your mom did with that other man was not. That was adultery. And yes that sounds harsh, but it better captures the seriousness of what took place. When we dilute the words we use for sin, we dull our sense of urgency in addressing them. We cheapen sin when we cheapen our vocabulary. The battle is always for the dictionary. No one wants to be bad or do evil, so the battle lines become the definitions of" bad" and "evil." The word "wickedness" is out of vogue. It sounds like a throwback to a time we don't want to remember, a world where sin was serious and consequences were severe.

But the bad news is even worse. Fair words for foul sins rarely create a sense of urgency in the offending party to seek reconciliation. After all, if it's just an affair, what's the big deal? If it's just getting what's mine, I may not feel the weight of my sin too heavily. In fact, I may even feel the opposite. I may feel a lightness of heart and a nobility in my spirit. I may consecrate my sins and count them to my credit. But that is the worst case scenario. Even in the best scenario, when it is acknowledged as sin, it is nevertheless reckoned only a minor offense as reflected by the minor words used to describe it. The most dangerous part of using wimpy words is that it produces wimpy salvation and wimpy sanctification. It produces no shocked faces to find that those who have been forgiven their "affairs" aren't exactly crushing it at the Christian life. Not because there is not forgiveness, but because the one who has been forgiven so little loves little. But the fact of the matter remains that the sin was more serious than the offender originally acknowledged. It's not that greater forgiveness and love were not available, but that they were available only in proportion to the degree that the sin was acknowledged.

All that to say, if you call your sins what Jesus calls them, they will sound like you're in greater trouble than if you used fairer words, but the good news is that you'll receive greater salvation and forgiveness than you ever imagined and the words for your deliverance will be grander and more pronounced in proportion.