Seven Shades of Sin: unmasking temptation

By Garry E. Milley

The key to a vibrant spiritual life is to understand the subtle and seductive ways in which we are tempted. This volume pulls the mask off the attractive presentation of seven specific sins and reveals their true ugly identities. The author offers keen insights into the schemes used by the malevolent dark powers to destroy the faith of the

• Language: English
• Publisher: London Elite Images
• Release date: Sep 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781775006732

Book preview

Seven Shades of Sin

Unmasking Temptation

Garry E. Milley

London Elite Images

St. Thomas, Ontario Canada

Seven Shades of Sin

Copyright © 2017 by London Elite Images

ISBN: 978-1-7750067-3-2 (e-book)

To Christine

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

The Seven Deadly Sins

Pride

Envy

Anger

Gluttony

Greed

Sloth

Lust

Acknowledgments

Several people have made this book possible. Dr. Iona Bulgin, PhD edited the manuscript and helped me correct many errors. Jennifer Roberts, Brenda Schyf, and Frank Patrick read the original chapters and gave encouragement along the way. Many thanks to Dr. Brian Stiller for the Foreword, and to Kathy Jimenez for her work in the book design and cover graphics. Winnie Roberts Winsor proposed the title. The accommodating staff at Roy Lane Café in Sioux Lookout, graciously tolerated my many long hours drinking coffee and writing. Fraser Rideout’s generosity enabled me to reflect and write in a beautiful beachside condo in South Carolina where the book was first conceived and structured. I express gratitude to Christine, my companion in love and in faith. We have journeyed together for more than four decades. What an adventure it has been. To her this book is affectionately dedicated.

Seven Shades of Sin is not a scholarly study and makes no pretence of being so. Yet, I trust, it is not an irresponsible effort. The rather oral nature of the chapters reflects their origin in the preaching task. They were written to be heard not read. But, to give them another life beyond the pulpit I offer them to you. The messages were first presented in the congregations of Park Avenue Pentecostal Church, Mount Pearl, NL, Church in the Oaks, London, ON, and New Life Assembly, Sioux Lookout, ON. These Christian gatherings were multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, composed of all ages and social demographics. I thank them for their kind response to my preaching which gave me incentive to publish this book. So, I am writing, not for those with a scholastic bent, but for ordinary Christians who wrestle daily with the world, the flesh, and the devil. I send these chapters out with the prayer that we may unmask the subtle ways of the tempter and gain victory over temptation to the glory of God.

Foreword

As I was reading Dr. Milley’s manuscript, I heard David Brooks, columnist with The New York Times, respond to questions about his recent book The Road to Character. He noted that words like sin and evil had been lost in the vocabularies about ourselves but, with the rise of religious fanaticism and widespread corruption, these words were creeping back, most often in discussions of social or economic matters.

In reading his helpful and insightful chapters, I wondered why many popular preachers moved from speaking about sin and, instead, emulated and reproduced Robert Schuller’s possibility thinking approach to the Gospel witness. What has been done is they have rather explicitly omitted sinfulness and failure as descriptors of human life. Could it be that in the rise of North America’s prosperity of the late twentieth century and then the stagnation of the middle class, there is a profound inner wish that hopes for personal well-being would find an ascendancy over the drudgery of wrestling with personal sin and its undoing? And, that the means by which we soar above, without even admitting our failures and lostness, would be found within ourselves, which in turn sponsored a plethora of self-help seminars, books, and recordings?

That is not to suggest that inviting people to find hope and possibilities in human well-being is not to be valued. The Bible is filled with exhortations for us to find ourselves—first in the imago Dei, his image, by the power of Christ to lift and then by the indwelling of his Spirit—and, by so doing, locate empowerment for life.

Milley refers us to C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a book worth reading annually. Lewis lifts into view a world we in the Global North not only ignore but assume it doesn’t exist: goodness and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan. Instead, we operate on a more psychological plane which sees conflict between their two disparities as more of an idea than a reality. If we lived in the Global South, these would be seen as actual players, not myth or good grist for movies, but day-to-day interfacing of forces which tug at inner lives, families, and societies.

The predisposition then is to view humanity, its lofty excellence and its dysfunctional tragedy, as a challenge for the loftier side to excel. Crafting our view of humanity as one filled with potential goodness, the darker side is obscured, closeted off. That is, until we no longer can ignore the blatant viciousness of those who in the name of their god behead. Aw, we note, now there is something so evil that we can label it as sin.

But at what point along the spectrum of naming something as evil or sinful is it in fact that? The heinous crimes of the Holocaust beg no debate on whether that was evil or not. However, coming back from that extreme, when are other crimes—less in magnitude and maybe in individual ferociousness—not evil or sin? Here is where our analysis falls down. We assume in our lofty humanity that we can see out across the landscape of life and define when an act is, and reflects sinfulness or not.

Is the level of corruption today not itself degrading to those who at the bottom of the economic pile feel the pain weighted by the greed of those who take the bribe? The small, under-the-table amount may seem insignificant. But it is any different, in its essence, to the government official or corporate executive who skims off for self? At what amount or magnitude does it become evil, when we know that the poor are the ones who really pay the price?

Here is the point. Sin affects us all. It is a reality fixed into the moral, social, and physical human construct, and to not understand it is to be infected by its usually bland or enticing nature. Devils do not come in their dark dress; rather, they are clothed in white. To know that such exist, that sin is an indelible factor of life, and that in Christ we have been found, and in being found, the death factor of evil and sin has been dealt a deathly blow, is to be wise.

Wise too is the author in providing this insightful understanding. Which is that by the beauty of the Gospel narrative, we understand that the presence and power of the risen Christ has mediated the conversation. This is the means by which we can know his freedom and overcoming love.

Brian C. Stiller

Global Ambassador, the World Evangelical Alliance

Introduction

The chapters in this book originated in a sermon series so the oral nature of the pulpit presentation is intentionally maintained. Sermons are always addressed to the ear rather than the eye and, while this can make for pedantic reading, I desire the reader to hear the message. I know, like George Whitfield, the eighteenth-century evangelist, that one can read a printed sermon and still not hear the thunder! Nevertheless, I trust these messages will be informing and inspiring.

The selection of seven sins seems arbitrary as there is no biblical warrant to classify these as a special limited list. Of all the lists of sins in Scripture, none includes a list similar to what has been called the deadly sins. But Christians of earlier times have, in their wisdom, handed down strong warnings about the insidious nature of these particular seven sins. These particular sins are part of the infernal strategy of the enemy of Christ, the Church, and the Christian. The use of the number seven is also arbitrary, but certainly influenced by the use of the number seven in the Bible and in church history. Seven is thought to be the number of perfection. There are, for example, seven spirits of God, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in traditional understanding, and seven virtues in classical thought.

Despite the arbitrariness of it, there is no doubt that believers over the centuries of the church have seen these sins as poisonous and extremely dangerous to spiritual life in the individual and in the church corporate. The list used here is the traditional list. The history of the list and the various inclusions and deletions need not trouble us. The resources are plentiful for the curious. It is my purpose to set out the ways in which we are tempted and drawn away from the life God desires for us.

We are living in a time when the church, in order to