Is Your Sin Just Playing possum?

You look out onto your deck and notice a possum rummaging through your garbage, so you grab a broom to shoo him away. Instead of running away like any decent marsupial the possum decides to go into full rigor mortis. Now if you’re not accustomed to this little trick that possums like to play, you’ll think you’ve given the little guy a heart attack and thus permanently solved your trash bandit problem. But if you know possums, then you know he is just playing dead. As soon as you go back in the house he’s going to “come to” and continue on with his dastardly plan of spreading your trash all about your deck.

Our sin is similar to a possum playing dead. I like the way John Owen put it. Owen gives two ways in which we can think we’ve mortified a sin but it’s really only retreated for a season. Here he explains one of those ways:

When it has had some sad eruption, to the disturbance of his peace, terror of his conscience, dread of scandal, and evident provocation of God. This awakens and stirs up all that is in the man, and amazes him, fills him with abhorrency of sin, and himself for it; sends him to God, makes him cry out as for life, to abhor his lust as hell, and to set himself against it. The whole man, spiritual and natural, being now awaked, sin shrinks in its head, appears not, but lies as dead before him:

I’ve seen this in my own life. I’ll hear a riveting sermon or read a helpful book and really draw my attention towards a particular sin in my life. I’ll put all my energies into growing and changing in this area. And I will be met with some success. In some instances grace really does win the day and sin truly is mortified. But I’ve also observed what Owen is saying in my life. I’ll think I’ve got a sin mortified but it was just playing possum. Once my focus is off that particular sin it’ll rear its ugly head again.

For me that sin is grumbling/cynicism. This is why I’m working on a book about hope and cynicism. I suppose that’s my way of shooing the possum off my porch. But my prayer is that I’ll truly mortify and not be content with the appearance of death in that sin. When it drops to the ground I’ve got to grab it by the scruff of it’s neck and take it out of my yard. (Really the preferable method would be to shoot the thing in the head—that’s what mortify means. But I don’t want angry letters from The Possum Lover of America, so I’ll just suggest relocation).

Do you have sin that’s just playing possum?

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Photo source: here