Read through the Bible in 2 Years: Psalm 119:1-40, 2 Samuel 19

We live in an area of the U.S. that fully experiences all four seasons of the year. We have hot summers and cold winters, with beautiful springs and falls in the transition times. It’s actually one of my favorite things about living here.

The problem is, though, that our area isn’t equipped to endure a week of below freezing temperatures or multiple inches of snow. When we get a heavy snow, there are no plows in sight, so we stay home and thank God for a pantry full of food and a furnace to keep us warm.

On one of these mornings, my son and I took advantage of a break in the snowfall to shovel our driveway. Trying to move 5-inch-deep snow is hard, back-breaking work, especially when your driveway is almost 100 yards long! The top few inches of snow may be light and fluffy, but that bottom inch gets packed down rock from repeated melting and freezing. I encouraged my son to do a quick once-over first, getting rid of that top layer, so the sun could get to that icy bottom layer. Then, ten minutes later, when he came back to the place where he’d started, that lower layer scraped off easily.

It got me thinking about how often we try to hide our hard hearts under layers of white fluff, or even under layers of “respectable” sins (the title of an excellent book by Jerry Bridges). It’s only when that top layer is scraped aside that the sunlight can do its work. As long as we keep hiding, refusing to do the hard work of bringing our sin into the open, that icy hard layer remains.

And yet, if we take that first step of sweeping away that fluffy top layer, but we refuse to deal with breaking up and shoveling away that thick, icy crust of hidden sin that we don’t want anyone to know about, all our work is for naught because that lower layer is where the serious danger lies. Those deep, hidden sins are what can really make us slip and fall, and fall hard.

A lesson from the life of David and from shoveling snow.

Heavenly Father, You are a good God and You want to free me from the hard, icy grasp of sin. Help me to bring into the light what I want to keep hidden in the dark. Help me to faithfully shovel away those “respectable sins” of covetousness and gossip so that I can bring into the light those pesky, hard to break, hidden sins of pride and deceit and fear and bitterness. In the Name of Jesus Christ I pray. Amen.