Is Sin Sabotaging Your Devotion?

Episode Description

In this episode of Whole-Life Worship, Cheryl Marshall explores how unaddressed sin can sabotage our devotion to God, dividing our hearts and undermining our pursuit of whole-life worship. Through relatable analogies and biblical examples, she identifies three common ways we mishandle sin—compartmentalizing, minimizing, and rationalizing—and offers practical, hope-filled insight from 1 John on how to respond faithfully. This episode encourages listeners to embrace honesty before God, leading to forgiveness and renewed devotion.

Key Topics Covered

• Three Ways We Mishandle Sin:
  • Compartmentalizing: Isolating disobedience while serving God outwardly.
  • Minimizing: Downplaying the seriousness of sin, redefining it, or avoiding biblical terminology.
  • Rationalizing: Creating excuses or “good reasons” for our disobedience.
• Biblical Examples: Lessons from Ananias & Sapphira (Acts 5), Lot’s wife (Genesis 19), and King Saul (1 Samuel 13) illustrate these pitfalls.
• Gospel Hope: 1 John 1:5–9 gives believers a blueprint for confession, forgiveness, and restoration.

Three Takeaways

1. Unchecked Sin Divides Devotion
   Compartmentalizing, minimizing, or rationalizing sin disrupts our fellowship with God, often leading to a divided spirit, diminished worship, and spiritual stagnation.
2. Honest Confession Brings Restoration
   Biblical confession—calling sin what God calls it and turning from it—invites God’s faithful and just forgiveness, restoring our intimacy with Him as described in 1 John 1:5–9.
3. God’s Grace Exceeds Our Failures
   No matter the depth of our disobedience, God promises gentle, thorough forgiveness in Christ for those who sincerely repent, freeing us from guilt and enabling wholehearted worship.

Resources Mentioned

• Scriptures Referenced:
  • Acts 5:1-11
  • Genesis 19:15-26
  • 1 Samuel 13:11-14
  • 1 John 1:5-9
• Book: All of Me: Pursuing a Life Wholly Devoted to God by Cheryl Marshall — Available through major booksellers and via the link in the show notes.
• Quote: C.H. Spurgeon — "When we deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us." 

Next Steps

• Reflect: Take time this week to honestly examine your own heart. Are you compartmentalizing, minimizing, or rationalizing any sins?
• Confess: Humbly and quickly confess any revealed sins to God, trusting in His gentle and faithful forgiveness.
• Engage: Subscribe, review, and share the podcast to encourage others on their journey toward whole-life worship.
• Explore Further: Consider reading "All of Me: Pursuing a Life Wholly Devoted to God" by Cheryl Marshall for deeper encouragement and practical tools.

Additional Ways to Connect

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to Whole Life Worship. This is Cheryl Marshall, and I'm so glad you're with us today as we pursue lives wholly devoted to God, without compromise, without comparison, in every circumstance. This is Whole Life Worship. In today's episode, I'm posing this question Is sin sabotaging your devotion to the Lord? As I've mentioned in earlier episodes, we are to worship the Lord, we are to glorify him with the whole of our lives. But sometimes we can find that disobedience is actually dividing our devotion to him. So how does that happen? And what can we do about it? So to begin, I'm going to talk about avocados. Now you may be thinking, did she just say avocados? Yes, avocados. As you're probably well aware, over the last several years, avocados have grown in popularity. I'm like everyone else, I like a good avocado toast. I like guacamole. I like to put avocado on my salad. And on more than one occasion, I've gone to the grocery store, I've picked out a beautiful avocado, I've taken it home, and a couple days later I've cut it open, and it's just disgusting on the inside. It's yuck, it's rotten. Well, sometimes you and I are like an avocado. We look good on the outside, but something is wrong on the inside. We're holding on to a sinful habit, an ungodly attitude, a relationship that we're not handling or responding to in a Christ-like way. And God knows the disobedience is there. We know it's there. And yet we may let hours or days or weeks roll on without really dealing with it. Unrepentant sin divides our devotion to God. It hinders our fellowship with Him. We can appear wholly devoted on the outside while being spiritually split on the inside. And so today I'd like us to consider three responses we have to our sin, which are actually hindering our devotion to the Lord. But there is good news. We have a wonderful, merciful Savior who provides a completely different way for us to approach our sin, and we'll end our time focusing on that real hope. So let's get specific. The first way we handle our sin that leads to divided devotion is compartmentalization. We compartmentalize our sin. Compartmentalization can happen on a large level, a macro level in our lives, or it can happen on a small level, or we could say a micro level in our lives. So on the macro level, on the large level, there may be a professing believer, but maybe she has the mindset that Sundays are for God, but the rest of the week is for her. Maybe she participates in religious activities such as prayer and maybe Bible study, church attendance, and maybe even some ministry. But the other areas of her life, the finances, the career, the recreation, in her mind, all of that belongs to her. The religious activity belongs to God. The rest of her life belongs to her. But more often, I think that believers who are pursuing a life devoted to God, who desire to glorify them with their lives, they or we compartmentalize sin on a micro level. Over here in this little pocket of our lives, we may have a pet sin, a sinful habit, an ungodly behavior or attitude. And it's something we would say and know is clearly violating the Word of God, but we're not dealing with it. We're not confessing it. We're not repenting of it. But beyond that, we'd say, you know, I'm living my life faithfully unto the Lord. Or at the very least, we're giving the impression that we are. But in reality, we're holding on to sin on the side. When we compartmentalize our disobedience to the Lord like that, we're living as if we're a TV dinner. Now, some of you might not know what a TV dinner is, and if you don't know, go ask your mom or your aunt or your grandma. But TV dinners were really popular probably in the 1970s and the 1980s. And basically, you could go to the store, go to the freezer section, you could buy this little box of food, take it home, and you would pull the tray out of the box. There might be a plastic film on the top that you would pull back, and there you would see your food. And it would all be in different compartments. And so the potatoes might be in one compartment, uh, peas and carrots in another, maybe a little bit of meatloaf in another, and always my favorite. There was a little apple pie or little cherry pie section. But each of them had their own compartment. You'd stick it in the microwave, let it run for a couple minutes, pull it out, you'd have a hot dinner, you'd plop down in front of the TV, and you'd eat it. And there's your TV dinner. But our lives are not TV dinners. That's not how God made us. Our lives are chicken pot pies. Every aspect of our lives is touching every other aspect of our lives. It's all mixed together. So if you are discontent or ungrateful in one area of your life, it's most likely that that heart issue is showing up in other areas of your life. If you are dishonest or argumentative with one person in your life, it's very likely in some way you are being dishonest and argumentative with other people. If you are entertaining immorality in what you're watching, reading, thinking about, don't be surprised if that spreads in your life. An example of compartmentalization we see in the scriptures is the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, 1 through 11. Ananias and Sapphira were a husband and wife who were part of the first church in Jerusalem. They had sold some property and had voluntarily given the proceeds to Peter and the other apostles for the church. But in reality, they had sold the property at a higher price, but they had kept back some for themselves, but they made it look like they were giving all of it when in reality they weren't. They were participating in the church community and worship, yet they had secretly carved out that little pocket, that little compartment in their lives where they held on to deceit and greed and pride. And the Lord severely disciplined them. They actually died on the spot. From this, we learned that God takes sin seriously, even the sin you may think is private and small. God did not create us to be compartmentalized beings. People who devote to Him the whole of our lives, all that we are and do, as the ultimate expression of our worship. So if you are compartmentalizing sin in your life by holding onto it with one hand while praising and serving him with the other hand, I just want to lovingly point out to you two things. Number one, God knows there is nothing that can be hidden from his sight. And number two, your devotion to the Lord is being sabotaged. So moving on. The second way we handle our sin that divides our devotion is closely related to the first. It's actually what we do after compartmentalization. We begin minimizing. We minimize our sin. When we minimize our disobedience, we downplay what it really is. We may acknowledge that we're disobeying God, but we strip the disobedience of its weight. We say, it's just a little thing. It's no big deal. Everybody does it. It's not hurting anyone. Those are the types of lies we tell ourselves when we minimize our sin. And we minimize our sin in two ways. The first is by not calling it what it really is according to the scriptures. We like to rename, or you could say, reframe, our sin so that it's much more palatable, it's easier to downplay, it's much more acceptable. We need to use biblical terminology for the sin in our lives, not only so that we will correctly identify it, but so that we will also be led to the biblical solutions for it. So you may say, I'm just venting. No, that's called complaining or maybe gossiping. I'm just frustrated. No, that's what we call an angry outburst. I'm just done with her. No, that's what we call being unforgiving. You see, we rebrand our sin so that we don't have to repent of it. The second way we minimize sin is by lowering our view of the mighty triune God. We have to downplay our view of the Father's holy character and perfect law. To minimize the significance of our sin, we have to take a small view of our Savior's sacrifice on the cross. We have to ignore what the Spirit of God gives us, both the conviction of sin and the power to obey. An example in the Bible of minimizing sin is the story of Lot's wife in Genesis 19. I'm sure you remember this story where God was destroying the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah with fire and brimstone. The angels who had brought Lot and his wife and their daughters out of the city explicitly told them to flee and to not turn around and to not look back at the cities as they escaped. But Lot's wife did turn back. She did look. And before she did, I wonder what was going on in her mind. Maybe she thought, I just want one last look. I just want one small glance. You know, it'll be just a very small turn of my head. But God didn't see it as small. The moment Lot's wife turned back to look at the cities, it revealed where her heart still was. It wasn't set on God's will, it was set on her own. And you know what then happened. She became a pillar of salt. Lot's wife had minimized both God's word and her disobedience to it. If you want to grow as a whole life worshiper, my new book, All of Me, Pursuing a Life Fully Devoted to God, was written especially for you. It's available through major booksellers and the link in the show notes. And so we now see that compartmentalizing and minimizing our sin both hinder our devotion to the Lord. And we have one more way that that happens, and that is by rationalizing our sin. If minimizing our sin says, you know, my sin isn't that bad, then rationalizing says, my sin is actually okay because I have good reasons for it. We don't just downplay our disobedience anymore. Now we're actually justifying it. We've come up with reasons that sin is acceptable and even necessary. When we do this, we're putting ourselves up as the ruler, or you could say the judge of our own behavior, and we're simply setting God's word aside. We're doing the opposite of what Proverbs 3.5 tells us to do. It says, trust in the Lord with all your heart. And here's the next part, the key part, and do not lean on your own understanding. When we rationalize our disobedience, we are setting our wisdom above God's wisdom. And in the process, we're usually blaming someone else or our circumstances. So rationalization can sound like this. I'm bitter because of what they did to me, and any normal person would feel the same. Or I won't forgive her because I know she'll do it again and she doesn't deserve it. Or maybe I have to get angry and yell, or they won't listen to me and they won't do as I say. Or here's one more. I lie about it because he doesn't really want to hear the truth. Rationalization of sin has been happening since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. But I think a later example in the Bible is really good for us to consider, especially since it's an example of disobedience dressed up as devotion. But it turned out to be a major fail. In 1 Samuel 13, we find King Saul rationalizing his sin. Israel is at war with the Philistines. The prophet and priest Samuel has given Saul clear instructions to wait for his arrival to make the burnt offering to the Lord. But Saul didn't wait. And I also want you to hear the consequences that followed. So I'll start reading the story starting in 1 Samuel 13, verses 11 through 14. Samuel said to Saul, What have you done? And Saul said, When I saw that the people were scattering from me, and that you did not come within the days appointed, and that the Philistines had mustered against us, I said, Now the Philistines will come down against me, and I have not sought the favor of the Lord. So I forced myself and offered the burnt offering. And Samuel said to Saul, You have done foolishly. You have not kept the command of the Lord your God with which he commanded you. For then the Lord would have established your kingdom over Israel forever. But now your kingdom shall not continue. The Lord has sought out a man after his own heart, and the Lord has commanded him to be prince over his people, because you have not kept what the Lord commanded you. So there we see a very obvious example of rationalizing sin. But it's often easier to see in others and not in ourselves. So if there's a sin in our lives that we are compartmentalizing or minimizing, it's likely that we're also rationalizing. We've come up with our own reasons why our sin is okay. So pause and ask yourself, what are my reasons for continuing in this sin? Be honest with yourself and then compare your answers to what you find in the Word of God. Now, if you're sitting there thinking, this is all so convicting, I want to encourage you that as uncomfortable and maybe even as painful as conviction is, it's a good thing for us. We can thank the Lord that the Spirit is turning us back to love him and to obey him with a whole heart instead of a divided heart. We can also thank him that he graciously provides us with a way to handle our disobedience that is truly honoring to him. And it's a way that we find in 1 John 1 verses 5 through 9. That passage says, This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you. God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to purify us from all unrighteousness. As we wrap up this episode, I want to show you five things in this first John passage to help you deal with your sin rightly and to no longer let it sabotage your devotion to the Lord. So, number one, God is light, and Him there is no darkness at all. In the Bible, light symbolizes truth, purity, and holiness. And darkness symbolizes falsehood, impurity, wrongdoing, sin. Our God is light. He is true, he is pure, he is without sin, and we now belong to him. He has rescued us from darkness and brought us into his marvelous light. And that leads us to number two. If we know God, we will also walk in the light. He says to be holy, for I am holy. He made us new creatures in Christ, he has set us apart, he has purposed us to honor him, and he has empowered us to live holy lives. And now that we belong to him, the trajectory of our lives is walking in the light. It's growing and reflecting his glory. And then number three, if we say we don't have any sin, we are deceiving ourselves. So when we compartmentalize our sin, when we minimize it, rationalize it, we are lying to ourselves about ourselves and about our offense against the Lord. But God calls us to lay aside all that foolishness. Number four, when we sin, we just need to humbly, and I'll add quickly, confess it to God. We are not to let that disobedience fester to the point of compartmentalizing it and minimizing and rationalizing it. So to confess our sin means that we come before the Lord, seeing our sin the same way he sees it, acknowledging what we have done is against him. It's against his holy nature and his holy word. But if he is so holy, how can we possibly be forgiven? And that brings us to number five. God is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. God is faithful, his word cannot be broken. He keeps his every promise that our sins are forgiven fully in Christ and held against us no longer. He is righteous. The punishment for our sin was poured out on Jesus on the cross, and there is no punishment, no condemnation left to be poured out on us who are in Christ by faith. God doesn't punish the same offense twice. He will not require from us the payment that Christ has already satisfied on our behalf. God is righteous and just and fair. So to sum up all of this, I'll leave you with what I think is a most precious quote by the famous British preacher C. H. Spurgeon. He said, When we deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us. I'll say it again. When we deal seriously with our sin, God will deal gently with us. So today, let's stop compartmentalizing and minimizing and rationalizing our sin. Instead, let's humbly and honestly confess it to the Lord, and He will deal gently with us. Thank you for listening to this episode. I invite you to please review, subscribe, and share, and keep pursuing a life wholly devoted to God without compromise, without comparison in every circumstance. This is Whole Life Worship.