Four Layers of Sin | Spiritual Cartography E1

Hey friends, it's John Mark, our team of practicing the way is really excited for our upcoming pastor conference happening January 26th through 28th of 2026 here in Los Angeles. The conference is sold out for in-person tickets, but if you are a pastor who still wants to gather with your team or a few friends and explore what formation looks like in your context, we have a watch gathering option for you. Our team can join remotely and watch each session live or on demand. We've also created resources designed to help your team process what you're learning and discern your next steps together. There is a lot riding on our shoulders as leaders, but we don't have to go on this journey alone. Learn more about watch gatherings at practicingtheway.org/pastorconference. Hello and welcome to the John Mark Homer Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host. Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space, and it's great to have you with us. As we jump into the new year, we're starting a special series that we're calling spiritual photography, featuring valuable content from John Mark's book Practice in the Way that didn't make it into the final version. Today, John Mark explained why spiritual photography matters, how mapping our spiritual journey can help us recognize the unique challenges, temptations, and invitation that come with each season of faith. Here's John Mark. In the 4th century, St. Seraphion the Sin-Dunite, one of the best known of the desert fathers, traveled from his monastery in Egypt to visit a woman in the city of Rome, who had become widely known as the spiritual master of the way. Unlike Seraphion, she did not retreat to the desert, but stayed at home and devoted herself to prayer. When he found her, she was quietly sitting in her room. Seraphion asked her, "Why are you sitting here? Her answer? I'm not sitting. I am on a journey." A through-line in practicing the way is that following Jesus is a kind of journey of the soul. But one in which we traverse the landscape of our inner woman or man. As Bishop Colestos wear put it, "We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity." And the spiritual journey calls for a kind of spiritual cartography, for a map to plot your location and chart your progress. Thankfully, such maps exist, where not the first apprentices to travel this path. Many saints have gone before us and left behind their hard-earned wisdom, warnings of what to avoid, directions for confusing crossroads, and inspiration for the seasons when we flag and falter, for what Eugene Peterson called "the spiritual bad lens." Of course, the use of spiritual cartography itself comes with all sorts of potential pitfalls. First, there is no one route. We may have the same destination, yes, but we all start from different places. Second, when we plot our location on a map and chart our progress, we can easily feel behind or even worse ahead, and as a result fall prey to either pride or despair, both of which trip us up on the journey. Finally, a map can be used and abused as just another attempt to control our spiritual formation, which cannot be controlled. This is an especially acute temptation for those of us, like myself, who are more task-oriented and success-driven. We can easily approach our spiritual life like our career as a task to accomplish or a mountain to climb. And it is a mountain, but waiting at the top is not a podium where we receive a trophy, but an altar where we offer a new surrender. Since Father Thomas Keating put it, the spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound. The journey is not up into the right, but downward into cruciformity, the pattern of death to self, followed by new life in God. If these dangers not with standing, mapping the spiritual journey is still worth the risk, because the only thing worse than trying to measure your spiritual progress is not trying to measure your spiritual progress. We all experience stages and seasons in our life, spiritual or otherwise, and each one has its own unique temptations, challenges, and invitations to growth. So loosely hold a map in your mind can, one, help you realize you're not alone, and two, help you avoid the various temptations which change over time, meet the challenges of each new season with poise, and say yes to Jesus' invitations at each stage. To that end, this little trilogy is designed to offer you a few maps of the spiritual journey. One from the vantage point of spirituality, the other from the world of psychology, and the last from the domain of theology. They overlay one another beautifully. Let's start with one I find incredibly helpful, sin. One way to think about the spiritual journey is as a multi-layered process of what the ancients called "pergation," the burning off of ever-deeper layers of sin which conspire to hold us back and hamstring our journey into the full flowering of maturity. Acognate to purgation is the word purgatory. The medieval doctrine of purgatory, the idea of a shadowy period in between death and entrance into heaven where we are purged of our remaining sins, may have been developed on questionable scripture references for even more questionable political purposes. But love it or hate it, the philosophical logic behind it was quite sound. What is holy, to travel into union with God, we must be burned clean of all that is unholy. As the saying goes, the fires of heaven are hotter than the fires of hell, a saying not to be taken literally. The sin in our life must be burned off like dross from a precious metal in order to become the radiant soul God always had in mind. The process of purgation goes through four layers of sin that we all carry in our body. The first is what the ancients called "gross sins." Not gross as an ew, but gross as an major sins, think of the saying it was a gross mistake. Such as those found on the Apostle Paul's list of sins of the flesh, sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like. I warn you as I did before that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. What the Apostle John calls "sin" that leads to death. Those sins are the first to go in our spiritual journey. These often populate the testimony stories we hear in church about people saved out of a life that was dramatically at odds with Jesus' vision of human flourishing, drugs, addiction, crime, etc. But gross sins are just the beginning. The next layer is conscious sins. These are sins that are perfectly acceptable, even celebrated in the culture at large, yet are clearly not the way of Jesus, watching sex scenes on TV or in film, gossip, cussing, dirty humor, dishonor of authority, materialism and more. I call these conscious because they are sins that we know are contrary to the teachings of Jesus, yet for the most part we choose to do them with our will. John Wesley called them willful transgressions of the known will of God. We're not yet dealing with the automatic responses of sin in our body that are so hard to dislodge, but with our unyielded self will. Over time, if we keep our heart soft to Jesus' gentle touch, he will lovingly convict us of these sins and invite us to a deeper layer of surrender, and with it, free them. The three are unconscious sins. In layer three, we pass a kind of invisible line into the shadow of our soul, from the conscious to the unconscious, where it's much harder to delineate between vice and virtue, where we're not even aware of all the sin we carry with NS or just how deep our wounding goes. Here under the shadow line, we have sins of omission, not commission, of what we don't do, rather than what we do, of inaction, rather than action. We have sins of motivation, where we do the right thing, serve the poor, stand up for justice, give our resources, et cetera, but for less than noble reasons to look good or gain status, to consolidate power or make money. This is an especially acute danger for pastors and people like myself who are, quote, professional Christians, please read here in a Sardonic tone. Then we have all our sins of compulsion. The sins we genuinely do not want to do, yet get sucked into doing again and again. All the addictive ways we self-sapotage, the ways our best intentions succumb to the unhealed impulses of our body. These sins are often rooted in pain or trauma from our past, and incredibly difficult to dislodge. And we have our dysfunctional relational patterns, the ways that other people emotionally experience us, as defensive, negative, condescending, overly talkative, uninterested, or self-focused. Let's pause for a moment and take the sin of anger as a case study. The gross layer of anger would be violence, brawling, domestic violence, road rage, murder. The conscious layer would be yelling at people who dare cross our will, mouthing profanities and name calling. The unconscious layer would be maturing to a place where you would never hit another person or even yell at them, yet inside you're still seething with resentment or unforgiveness and it's leaking out to non-verbal cues that cause pain to those you love. Or no matter how hard you try, you find yourself making biting comments to your spouse or children. The third layer is a far more painful stage of percussion, yet it is essential. Layers one and two are just about behavior, and while behavior modification is a good thing, it doesn't go deep enough to the root problem, our warped heart. All we ever deal with is behavior, even if we succeed, which is highly unlikely, we're no better than a Pharisee. But once you get into layers three and four, up next, we're dealing with what the psychologist Carl Jung and others call the shadow, the parts of ourself that are hidden even from our own view. As our shadow is exposed by the unexpected twists of life, by our closest relationships, by suffering and by prayer, it can be incredibly painful and humbling, even humiliating. Yet again, each new layer of surrender comes with a new level of freedom. But we're still not to the very bottom of things. Layer four is our attachments. These are not necessarily sins at all. They are often good things, very good things, even, but things that we emotionally depend on to live a happy life. Keeding called them our emotional programs for happiness. The Robert Mahallen called them our trust structures, and defined them as deep-seated attitudes and inner orientations of our being, out of which our behavior patterns flow. Those deep inner postures of our being that do not rely on God, but on self for our well-being. The reformed tradition calls them idols of the heart, which Pastor Tim Keller famously defined as a good thing made ultimate. They can be anything that does not go by the name of Jesus, yet we feel the need for to be okay. Things like health, emotional well-being, marriage, children, relational status, friendships, career, ministry, success, wealth, reputation, our plans. It's hard to believe it, but these gifts can become the very source of our unhappiness. The problem is not the gifts, it's our emotional attachment to the gifts. As the Indian Jesuit Anthony Damello put it, "If you look carefully, you will see that there is one thing that causes unhappiness. The name of that thing is attachment. What is an attachment? An emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy." We cling to these attachments, because we genuinely believe that we need them to be happy, yet they are the very source of our misery. Why? Because all of them can be taken away. Not one of them is safe from harm. As a result, they promise us peace, but give us great anxiety. And it's in this last layer of sin that we are most in bondage, and most in need of saving by Jesus. And it's here that Jesus' teachings are at their most radical. The great paradox of Jesus' message is, "As long as you need your life to go a certain way to be happy and at peace, you will never be happy and at peace. Instead you will live with the nagging, undercurrent of fear, what Jesus called anxious care. And this underlying fear will sabotage not only your happiness, but your growth into a person of love. Because as long as we need our lives to go a certain way to be OK, despite our best intentions to love well, we will inevitably manipulate and bully and hurt those around us whenever they get between us and our attachments. We are still at a point in our spiritual journey where we would rather cause pain than suffer it, as Jesus did, and surrender to God in it." This is the end goal of the spiritual journey, a radical trust in and surrender to Jesus as your one true source of happiness and peace. What the mystic Jean-Pierre d'Acassade called "abandonment to divine providence." What Saint Ignatius called "freedom" and captured so well in his famous saying, "We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one, for everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our life in God. Our only desire and our one choice should be this, I want and I choose what better leads to God deepening his life in me." And all the spiritual masters, from the writers of the New Testament to the saints of church history, sing and harmony, the primary way we are liberated from our bondage to attachments is through the crucible of suffering. It is there in the fire of pain and loss that we are purged and purified. Suffering is the gift none of us want, but it's still a gift because it has the effect if we let God work in it, of stripping us of our attachments. All that we cling to, health, well-being, loved ones, material wealth, our plans, even the sense of God's felt presence, is torn away against our will, it's excruciating emotionally. But if we say yes to Jesus' call in suffering and attached to Him in a deeper way, we discover the one source of happiness that can never, ever be taken away from us. We experience an unshakable peace. The kind of peace Saint Seraphim of Sarov was referring to when he said, "Peace is gained through tribulations." The beautiful surprise is that when we lose the very things we are most terrified of losing, we realize we're still okay. What is with us, His love is all around us, our life is still full of goodness, and Jesus can and will bring good out of our pain as Julian of Norwich put it, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." So let go of your fear, of your futile grasping for what you cannot possibly control. Get patience, finish its work, so that you may be mature and complete. Peace is waiting for you on the other side. John Mark's point about attachment and suffering can be really challenging. The surrender is the crux of our faith and journey with God. So, we want to wrap up by asking the Holy Spirit to bring awareness to our attachments, and then we'll take some time to move towards the willingness to surrender them to God. Let's start, as always, by calming our bodies and centering our mind on God with a few deep breaths, and then ask the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, what attachment or attachments am I clinging to? With that fall or air in mind, ask the Holy Spirit in your own words to help you surrender. Loose in your grip and trust the He's good in every situation. I'll leave a few seconds for that and close with Amen. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Things to little thoughts for our show music. We're a crowd-funded non-profit, so everything we make is completely free, because it's already been paid for by the circle, our community of monthly giveaways. Special thanks today goes to James from San Diego, California, Tyler from Rockefeller, Tennessee, Kate from Landrum, South Carolina, Jamie from Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and Jessica from Richardson, Texas. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.