Why Am I So Miserable?

If I want to live and die in the joy of my only comfort of belonging to Jesus Christ, 

• I must first come to know about my sin and misery.  
• But before that, I need to understand what is meant by the terms: sin and misery.

SIN are those acts that I commit in rebellion against God. 

MISERY is the punishment which God inflicts upon my rebellion.

Spiritual misery happens 

• when my heart becomes hard, with the result that I hate God. 
• My mind becomes darkened, with the result that I become foolish in my thinking, no longer knowing God. 
• My will becomes enslaved to evil, with the result that I am inclined only and always to evil. 

Physical misery happens 

• when my body is subject to sickness, pain, and ultimately to death. 
• The realm of nature is also cursed, resulting in natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, cyclones, droughts, and the like. 
• The animal kingdom is also cursed, with the result that animals have turned in hostility against man and against each other.

I might think that knowledge of my sin would come from my own conscience. 

• After all, as a fallen human, I retain some ideas about God, 
• and about natural things, 
• and about the difference between what is honorable and shameful. 

Furthermore, there are many things in this world that should tell me about my misery. 

• All the sickness and death in the world, 
• all the violence and crimes, 
• all the hatred and war, should make my misery evident to me. 
• The media is quite sufficient to make me know my misery.

However my conscience is not enough to give me knowledge of my sins,

Neither is the experience of misery enough to give me knowledge of my misery. 

There are a number of reasons for this. In the first place, the word “know” means more than just know about sin. 

• It carries with it the idea of acknowledging sin before God. 
• This is something that I as a natural human refuse. 
• Even though my conscience may accuse me of doing wrong, I suppress this knowledge (cf. Romans 1:18). 
• Though I may know about my sin, I refuse to acknowledge it in humble repentance before God. 

In the second place, things such as sickness and death are sufficient to tell me that there is misery, 

• but they cannot tell me why there is misery, 
• and that is certainly what I need to keep in mind when it comes to knowing my misery.

Still further, although my sins and misery should be obvious to me from what I experience in daily life, my mind does not register the signals that come to me. 

• That is because my mind has become impaired through sin.  
• Scripture says that the mind of fallen man has become darkened and senseless (cf. Romans 1:21). 
• Because of this mental darkness, I do not come to know my sins by what I experience in life. 

Another reason for having to learn about my sin and misery is because I am like everyone else. 

• All of us are conceived and born in sin. 
• All of us are by nature corrupt. 
• All of us are the same. 

And if all of us are the same, we conclude that this is normal. 

• If we all had six fingers on each hand, we would think that this is normal. 
• We would not know better.

In like manner, all of us are depraved. 

• Thus we tend to think that this is natural. 
• Imperfection is a part of humanity. 
• “To err is human,” we all say. 

Yet it is not; imperfection is abnormal. 

• God created me perfect but I have become depraved through my fall into sin. 
• This teaches me that I should not judge the correctness of what I do by looking to what most other people do. 
• Sometimes I might say, “everybody does it!” which seems to imply that it must be acceptable. 
• However, what society in general accepts or what my church friends accept is not necessarily what God accepts.