"God has us fight besetting sins to remind us of how ugly the unnoticed ones are." I can't recall the attribution. This is a paraphrase--from some of the Eastern fathers, I think.
I would add that sometimes we might focus on confessing particular sins over and over as a deep self-deception of refusing to see the sins God actually wants us to be concerned with. It may be a Screwtape sort of situation, where dropping our own obsession with certain sins and focusing on the standard, liturgical, boring lists of sins might in the end be the only road toward eliminating our besetting sins.
I have been discovering in the last year how much I am a tangle of resentments, carried both secretly and openly. I think I am discovering that confessing those and trying to amend my life accordingly has had more effect on anger, lust, selfishness, and deceitfulness than any of the direct attacks on those sins I have tried to mount over the last fifty years.
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I would add that sometimes we might focus on confessing particular sins over and over as a deep self-deception of refusing to see the sins God actually wants us to be concerned with. It may be a Screwtape sort of situation, where dropping our own obsession with certain sins and focusing on the standard, liturgical, boring lists of sins might in the end be the only road toward eliminating our besetting sins.
I have been discovering in the last year how much I am a tangle of resentments, carried both secretly and openly. I think I am discovering that confessing those and trying to amend my life accordingly has had more effect on anger, lust, selfishness, and deceitfulness than any of the direct attacks on those sins I have tried to mount over the last fifty years.
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