Title:- Sinking Secret Boxes with The Wonderful Weight of Witness
James 5:16 Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.
Film Director and writer M. Night Shyamalan, presents an interesting theme in his 2004 film, ‘The Village. ’ This theme is of course one of ‘paralysing fear’ and friends, make no bones about it, restrictive paralysis is one of the main products of such an eating fear. In a multitude of fascinating ways, the director of ‘The Village’ shows us the methodology of such applied fear and in doing so, is quite brilliant and instructive toward us who are Pastors and the ‘curer’s of souls’.
Set in rural Pennsylvania in 1897, the citizens of the small village of Covington are surrounded by a forest that is supposedly inhabited by a race of ‘mythical creatures’ which must never be directly referred to. The supporting structures of fear, which hem in and astonishingly restrict the villagers, are multitudinous. However, today let’s look at the fictional elders of this ‘Village’ who each keep in their houses, locked boxes for all to see. Only the elders of the village have the keys to the locked boxes and the subsequent knowledge of their contents. All who visit the elder’s houses, openly see the boxes, and everyone knows of their presence but no one knows of their contents, except that they contain terrible reminders of the personal past of the village elders. Two things then come to my mind from this most terrifying testimony that M Knight Shyamalan unwittingly paints for us Christians in his story of ‘The Village.’
First, that I have observed many Christians who have been on the road a little while and have fallen maybe a few terrible times in the past; that they carry with them similar locked boxes containing secrets of that past which they have decided to bring along with them on their bowed, bent and burning backs of shameful pain. In a strange way, such self-inflicted punishment has seemingly provided for them a means of grace, a way for them to accept the forgiveness of God? Sure, they are forgiven through confession and repentance and God’s grace has been let loose upon them in astonishing and undeserving manner, yet, they can only accept this, if they suffer under the burden of carrying the locked box secrets of the past. I tell you, this is supremely devilish, for it encases loving and leaping grace, in the crippled calipers of a possible condemning disclosure. What a fear is that to the forgiven child of God! What a devilish, burning fear!
To you bent and doubled over brethren, brought low from the condemning secrets of your past, God says again today, “Your sins I will remember no more!” For some of you, today is the day that together with Jesus, you take that box of secrets, weighed with the judgment of His bloody cross and let it loose, let it slip, let it slide like the corpse that it is, from the deck of your sorry sailing ship and into the deepest seas of God’s eternal forgetfulness. It’s not a case of publicly opening it, but rather a case of you privately ditching it! How dare you keep, in weird preciousness, those things he has forgiven and remembers no more!
You say, “I’ve tried to do that, but the box keeps coming back to haunt me! Like a buried corpse beneath the waves , in all my terrible dreams it continually waits to break the surface of lake of my life” Yes, I believe you and it’s very frightening when this fear comes upon you. I remember my father telling me the story of how as a young child, hating his neighbour's cat, he took it and threw it down a very deep well, only to return home to find that same cat sat in the house of his grandmother, waiting for him and staring him down! Many of you have thrown your box down a similar well or into a similar deep, only to find it mockingly appearing in various new rooms, new situations, even new relationships that you have entered into. It would appear that these secrets of your past follow you around and turn up in the most unwanted of places. You may have thrown the box many times into the deepest seas, but its continued buoyancy is such, that it cannot help but float to the surface. Friend, the only way to sink this beast once and for all, is to open it up and then weigh it down. How do you do this?
Well, you must today or very, very soon, find a mature Christian, a holy person in God and unlock this box together, and then with confessional tears and the weight of God’s glorious and forgetting forgiveness, finally close it together, once and for all. Then cast it with proclamation, into the deepest and eternal seas of God’s forgetfulness. I tell you, the weight of such a faithful witness to your repentance and God’s forgiveness, will weigh it down forever.
Listen: - Who is a God like You, Pardoning iniquity And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage? He does not retain His anger forever, Because He delights in mercy. He will again have compassion on us, And will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins Into the depths of the sea. Micah 7:18-19
Pray: Disturber of seas, maker of roaring waves, take my sins O Father, my deepest sins, my darkest sins, my secret sins and weigh them down with Your glorious forgiveness that both You and I shall most happily remember them no more and they shall never appear again. Amen.
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