As we are going through this disaster of a time – make time to mourn over your sin. Stop and contemplate its horror. Meditate on how filthy our hearts are. Look your sins straight in the face and weep over them. Consider fasting to help you focus on your sinfulness. Pray that God would cause you to see the blackness of sin. Joel teaches us that when disaster like this comes upon us, we ought to mourn over our sin (Joel 2:12-13).

This current crisis should drive Christians and the church to mourn and repent. We should see one of our duties at the moment as mourning over our sin. In both Testaments this was often accompanied by weeping, wailing, grief, lament, fasting, putting ashes put on one’s head or a humbled posture and the wearing of sackcloth – a very itchy and course material.

Someone who mourns his sin is humble before God and fasts or wears sackcloth not in order to pay for sin like some sort of penance, but because it demonstrates that he knows he does not deserve God’s blessings.

When we experience a disaster, such as the current one, we should be prompted to consider the depth of our sin and to mourn over it. To help us to that end, here are seven reasons why should we mourn over sin. Some of these reasons were inspired by Thomas Watson’s excellent little book on The Doctrine of Repentance.

1. Our sin is worse than our afflictions.

The cause is worse than the effect. All of our afflictions come because of our sinfulness. If we think people dying of a disease is bad, we need to realise that sin is worse. All suffering should point us to the fact that sin is a terrible evil because it is because of sin that we live in this cursed world.

2. Our sin finds its origin in the Devil.

Those who revel in sin are children of Satan. 1 John 3:8 says “He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has sinned from the beginning.”

3. Our sin is an offense to God.

The Bible describes sin as dishonouring God (Rom 2:23), despising God (1 Sam 2:30), and cheating on God like a wife cheating on her husband (Ezek 6:9).

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