Practicing "Sin"

I heard recently that Martin Luther advised those who struggle with legalism to practice committing little "sins." Here was a man who was abundantly familiar with the tortures of guilt. (The more I learn about that guy, the more I want to know. I don't have his strong personality, but I feel like I relate to him in just about every other way.) After years of trying to overcome my obsession with being good by being even better, I've come to the same conclusion he did. I turned 32 on Monday. The first 30 of those years were spent with a stick firmly up my ass. The last two have all about dislodging it, and I'm not done yet. (See that bad word I used? That's me practicing.)

The Bible says that the Kingdom of God (heaven on earth, a small sample of heaven to come) is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. JOY. Not likely when you're in a fruitless quest for perfection, powered by your own steam. The Christian deal is that you stop trying to bear our own weight; Jesus takes it all. Depending on where you are in your life, that may sound like either an impossible sacrifice or the biggest relief ever. In my case, it's just hard to get my head around, because I have such an overwhelming sense of responsibility for everything. But I've been coming to a greater realization of the wrongness of trying to do God's job for Him, and as that realization grows, I see what extreme (to my mind) measures are necessary to combat that tendency in myself.

Legalism itself is a sin. I don't know if God rates sins, or if so, how, but I do believe that some sins have worse consequences than others. Legalism distorts my view of God, which messes up my relationship with Him. That's wrong. It then leaves me empty and with nothing to give people. That's also wrong. And I think it's worse than whatever harm may be done to my body by eating extra cookies (something I would normally feel guilty about). If, by choosing to eat those cookies simply because I can, I can also combat my tendency to agonize over whether I should eat them, then the "sin" of eating the cookies seems like a good idea.

There's also a reason why I've been putting the word "sins" in quotation marks. I believe that sin is real, and that it is truly sinful. But I'm good at feeling guilty no matter what I have or haven't done. It's not so bad now, but there was time in my life when regardless of what I was doing, I felt like I should be doing something else. If I was playing in the pool with my 11-year-old neighbor, I should really have been practicingmy trombone. If I was practicing my trombone, it was selfish because my neighbor didn't have any younger friends within walking distance. I always felt wrong because I had no sense of discernment about what was truly right or wrong in a situation. But playing in the pool wasn't necessarily a sin. Neither was playing my trombone. It just felt that way. If I'm to do anything in my life, ever, I need to push past that and do things that feel like sins to me, because most things feel like sin to me.

Committing little "sins" in order to overcome the big one, legalism. That may sound like the worst idea ever. But it works a lot better than my previous plan -- read the Bible more and pray longer and go to church whenever the doors were open. All those things are good if they come from the right place. But for me it was all about working harder and continuing to fail miserably.

To hell with that.