Christians Can Be So Full of Yesterday's Junk
It is a healthy sign for a Christian to hate sin, to regret it, to repent of it, to feel hurt about sin, to be ashamed of their shortcomings and to have guilt for disobeying God after they were given a new life in Christ. It can also be unhealthy when Christians can dwell too much on their failures than the restoration. Do they even realize that it is because of the pride of life that they fell down? I remembered asking a pastor to why I fell into serious error even after trying my best. The pastor said that my mistake was that I failed to rely on the grace of God and trusted my arm of flesh. That is also part of yesterday's junk.
It is also a part of yesterday's junk to get angry. It is normal for Christians not only to get mad at themselves but to get mad at others. It is very tempting to cling to one's anger because one's pride in the flesh was hurt. It is sometimes easy to forget that the Christian life is doing one's best by God's grace working in one's life and not doing one's best by one's flesh. It has always been God be glorified and not the Christian in every area of the Christian life. Christians do have reasons to get angry which is not necessarily sin. Does it not make the Christian get angry if people continue their sinful actions against God and laugh off Hell and judgment? It certainly does not make a Christian happy to see places that influence sinful actions, to see sin glorified and people who hate God murder the Christians for standing up for CHrist. But it certainly becomes yesterday's junk when the Christian holds on too much to that anger rather than pray for the salvation of people.
It becomes a problem when Christians just focus too much on the anger against sin without any sympathy for the sinner. I remembered the time I said, "Preach to those people who keep mocking me? I'm mad enough not to preach to them! I would rather see them in Hell than repent and see them in Heaven!" That was also the problem of Jonah was when he failed to see God was no respecter of persons. It is possible for any Christian to feel like Jonah or to wish for judgment. While God certainly will punish sin but to ask God for something big as punishment and to be avenged immediately is not called for either. Even if God will certainly avenge later but He also gives space to repent before He inevitably executes His holy justice towards the unrepentant.