These words reveal a challenging truth. It's humbling and helpful to pause and consider this serious matter. Our worship is filled with sins like hypocrisy, formality, lukewarmness, irreverence, distraction, and forgetting God. Our service for the Lord often includes competition, selfishness, carelessness, slacking, and unbelief. What a mess we make!

In private prayer, we're lax, cold, neglectful, sleepy, and vain. There's a mountain of self-made barriers. If we looked closer, we'd see our sin is greater than we imagine. Dr. Payson once wrote that his heart and parish resemble a neglected garden. He confessed that even his wish for improvement often stemmed from pride, vanity, or laziness. He wanted the weeds gone, but sometimes for the wrong reasons: to boast of his garden or to avoid the work of maintaining it.

Even our desires for holiness can be tainted by selfish motives. Like worms under grass, our sins hide until we look closely. But there's comfort in knowing that when the High Priest carried the sin of sacred things, he also wore "Holiness to the Lord" upon his brow. Jesus carries our sin and presents, before the Father, not our unholiness, but His holiness. May we have the grace to see our great High Priest through the eyes of faith.