It seems like, as a whole, that our culture belittles calling anything a sin. "Purity police" or "self-righteous" gets thrown around when someone calls something sin, especially when it is something that we don't consider a sin. Instead of having a rational discussion on whether something is a sin, people resort to belittling each other.
Yet sin is dangerous. Sin places us outside of the will of God. When we sin, we are not bringing about God's will here on earth as it is in heaven.
Some just focus on getting saved. In that framework, all sin is equal and just separates us from God. We just need His grace to get us right with Him and be saved. Unfortunately, in that framework, we ignore what it actually means to live right with Him and to live saved.
If we just want to get saved, then it may be true that we aren't minimizing anything by continually sinning. Yet if we are concerned with the cause of the kingdom of God, then sin does prevent us from accomplishing that. A sin today has consequences far into the future, even after God has forgiven us for that sin.
Sin damages; that's its nature. It's us missing the mark from the life we are called to live. When we do that, we and those around us miss out.
Yet it seems popular among Christians in general and our society as a whole, to just dismiss sin. We will use the woman caught in adultery and say that Jesus didn't judge her, but that's just not true nor is it the point of the story. Jesus didn't allow her to be killed for breaking the law, but He did judge her and told her to go and sin no more. Despite our culture's great "morality" of tolerance, Jesus instructs us how to judge and tells us to judge rightly. (See Judge Not Or Judge Rightly.)
Sin is horrible for the church. And our belittling people calling something a sin is dangerous. When we treat those who want to teach moral living as jerks, we are close to just tickling our ears and being people who don't call anything sin that we enjoy doing. If we don't teach a morality different from our culture, are we really all that different? Are we really following Jesus? Or are we just being tossed here and there by the common zeitgeist? We can't dismiss sin. Our mission is too important for that.
If we are
wrapped up in sin, we are not living in freedom. When we are not living
in freedom and being guided by the Spirit, we will have difficulty
being loving.
We must get to where we focus on doing good. It's just that sin is an obstacle to that. It doesn't help that the church in America seems to be divided between two extremes: Those who are focused on doing good and those who are focused from abstaining from certain sins.
What if we realized that not doing good is a sin and that being ensnared by sin prohibits us from doing good?
It doesn't hurt to call things that are sin "sin" because we are just instructing people about common pitfalls that prevent us from being Christlike.
We must get to where we focus on doing good. It's just that sin is an obstacle to that. It doesn't help that the church in America seems to be divided between two extremes: Those who are focused on doing good and those who are focused from abstaining from certain sins.
What if we realized that not doing good is a sin and that being ensnared by sin prohibits us from doing good?
It doesn't hurt to call things that are sin "sin" because we are just instructing people about common pitfalls that prevent us from being Christlike.
