Lakeside Visitor January 2011

 

Last year I talked about getting our speech under control. The reason I gave in December was to become more like Christ, not about properly ‘doing’ religion. If hampering the tongue isn’t about Jesus, then the Church is just “a self-help club for the inwardly mobile.” To keep us from becoming a country club of like-minded people who don’t serve a purpose past ourselves, we need to get serious–not to mention honest–about everyone’s favorite topic of dinner conversation: sin.

I know. Time for a much-needed potty break or a drink of water, right? Sin is one of those topics we try to avoid. It doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves so we avoid the topic altogether. Or, better yet, keep a loose grip on the definition of sin. Well, my goal over the next 12 months isn’t to remove the teeth from ‘SIN’ but to castrate the power of it over our lives. That’s powerful language, yes, but we need power to… well, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. In each quarter we’ll discuss sin in four areas: how God sees sin, the universality of sin in our lives, our response to sin, and finally the conquering of sin. The goal is to move from foundation to house, not vice versa. The clear imagery here is that if we first build our house and fill it with things that comfort and put us at ease, then any thought to a foundation will have to conform to what we already believe. But if we build a foundation that is true in all ways, even if life destroys the house we’ve carefully built, we ourselves will stand firm.

So what is sin? Is it doing bad things? Making God mad? Hurting others or yourself? We try to define these boundaries so we can know before we cross the line. We are not so different from children in the sense that a defined line gives us a chance to flirt with disaster, push the envelope, without actually sinning. We’ll talk about that later, but for now I’ll just say we go about it wrong this way. I have been telling the youth that sin is a perversion of the good things of God: remember, God made everything good and we messed it up. But let me give you the meat behind the easy-to-remember line. We’ve all heard the word for sin (hamartia [+] in the Greek, for my fellow nerds) means to ‘miss the mark,’ or some variation thereof, but that’s an oversimplification. It can also mean to err, go astray, do wrong, offend, harm, or rebel–and that’s just for starters!

God sees our sin as not just something we do, but an extension of what’s inside–our fatal flaw. Our wrongs come from being wrong toward God. When Israel wanted a king other than God, they weren’t rejecting Samuel, but God Himself (1 Sam. 8:7)! We have not simply missed getting to God in our pursuit of Him, or anything so sterile as this, but have rejected God as king. We continue to do so, and whatever is not submitted to Him is sin. We enjoy the good things of God but not with thankfulness to God. And that is a perversion of God’s good gifts. We were never meant to replace God with God’s creation or our own devices (Rom. 1:21). This month I encourage you to think about what areas in your life you have built up a wall to divide you from God. God sees sin as rebellion against His lordship in our life, not just missing the mark. See how you might keep rebellion from perverting the good things of God this month.