What is Common to All

The Power of Sin

Titus 1:16 (NKJV)
¹⁶ They profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work.

What do you think of when you consider your sins? What does God think of when He considers your sins? How does your awareness of your sin affect you? How does it make you feel? How does your awareness of sin change your self esteem? When Jesus died “for our sins” did he remove our desire to sin? Is it possible that some behaviors I consider sins are really not sins at all? Jesus tells Peter not to call “unclean” what is really clean. (Acts 10:9ff) Is it possible to be so blinded by our rebellion that we call some sins “good?” These are my questions: none of which have I settled completely.

If, the presence of sinful behavior is sure evidence of being lost, then I am lost and, I suspect, most others are as well. The Shorter Catechism teaches that sin is defined by the law of God. If we violate the moral principles delineated throughout the scriptures by failing to align our actions to all their dictates, then we sin. The teachings of the earliest Christian writers make it clear that sins can be active or passive. We sin when we act wrongly and we sin when we fail to act rightly.

I am of the opinion that sin is an evil force that always injuries its practitioner. I shutter when I consider the harm my everyday sins has brought on those I love and, even, on those I do not know. When, for example, I consider my own gluttony in the light of the reality of even one person, who died of hunger, my heart sinks with shame. I know the boundaries of my goodness. I want to love more purely and more freely and more widely, but I cannot.

Do I mean that I am incapable of loving to the degree I desire to love? If I am not free to love more, then how can my lagging be considered a sin? Are we morally obligated to do that which we cannot do? Perhaps not. This brings us to deepest aspect of sin. The root of sin is rebellion against our Creator. This is where we see it most clearly and this is where we can make the greatest progress. What is opposite of rebellion? Is it not submission to the Will of God?  We read in the Reformed Confessions that the Law of God is the will of God.

The key to a peaceful heart is repenting of all our sins and desiring to know our sins more clearly. We agree with a Holy God that we have indeed sinned. We vow, with all sincerity, to not repeat the wayward act. We ask God to take away our desire to do this particular sin. We might have to ask God to make us more sensitive to the good that we could do if it only occurred to us to do it.

Any consideration of sin must be ended by a reaffirmation of Divine Mercy and the sufficiency of our Lord’s work on the Cross. Awareness of sin is far less important compared to the deep gratitude we feel for the perfect and finished work of our Savior Jesus who takes on our sins as his very own. It is too frightening to seriously consider our sinfulness apart of comfort of the Cross.

Quotations:

It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the light and out into nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft under foot, without sudden turnings, without signposts. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions. Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971)

Anybody who has once been horrified by the dreadfulness of his own sin that nailed Jesus to the cross will no longer be horrified by even the rankest sins of a brother. Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)

Disobedience and sin are the same thing, for there is no sin but disobedience. Theologia Germanica (c. 1350)
 

Fight with your own sin, and let that fight keep you humble and full of sympathy when you go out into the world and strike at the sin of which the world is full. Phillips Brooks (1835–1893)

 I enquired what the iniquity was and found it to be no substance but the perversion of the will, turned aside from thee, O God. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430)