Sin. Its Consequences.

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.

Grace Shared or Grace Abused

A friend and I were having this conversation. He's a pastor and refused to baptize an individual because of sin in their life that they wouldn't repent from.

I said:
We have this massive sin of materialism in our lives. And for some reason, we are comfortable saying that we are better than some other person who struggles with a different sin. We deceive ourselves and think that we are worthy to be baptized because our sin is an accepted sin in American Christian culture.

We are so far from Jesus. We need grace. Grace that I receive. Grace that I also have to be willing to dispense. If Jesus doesn't want to accept the unrepentant sinner wanting to be baptized, that is between Him and them. But I am not going to refuse baptism to someone that is a sinner just like me.

If I will only be perfect on the other side of eternity, and I know that. If I know that my imperfection is covered by His undeserved grace. I know that if people could peer into my heart and told me to change the sins in my life right now, I wouldn't be able to. After all this, if I encounter a person who struggles with a different sin than I struggle with, a person who isn't willing to change that part of their life, yet they want the same grace that I revel in, should I deny that grace to them?

I share this here because I want other perspectives. I don't want to get the conversation bogged down in one specific sin, so I don't share what the sin was. But I was looking for input.

Put Me In The Zoo or Learning To Fly

Have you ever seen an eagle fly?

I have seen an eagle at the zoo. The eagle was locked up in a cage. It was an outdoor cage, probably designed to elicit the feeling that the eagle was in its natural environment. The powerful eagle sat there in the sun, staring at us through the fence. Despite being encaged, the eagle still looked majestic. I couldn’t help but think that there is something special about the eagle.

Two times, I have seen an eagle fly in its real natural environment. Once, I was driving over the Hoover Dam and as soon as I crossed over, an eagle swooped down nearly twenty feet from my car only to soar back up. Impressive. It seems almost a disservice to verbalize the experience of seeing an eagle fly because words cannot quite capture the feeling. There is a sense of awe. There is an experience of beauty as if beauty is something tangible. As the eagle flew by, effortlessly, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sight.

Let’s change gears for a moment. God did amazing things to rescue the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land: The plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the miraculous sustenance of manna in the wilderness. He proclaimed to them, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exodus 19:4 ESV).

I love the phrase “on eagles’ wings.” The power. The swiftness. The beauty. The ease. The concept is repeated in Isaiah’s book: “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31 ESV).

God freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and had some expectations for them. “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6 ESV).

God desired for His people to obey His voice and keep His covenant. Being His people wasn’t something that automatically happened by a declaration from God. God did choose them, but the Israelites needed to respond with obedience and faithfulness. Oh, how we long to just be zapped with a magic wand that transforms us into God’s people, but we have a choice to make. Daily. Obedience to God or enslavement to the sins of the world. Keeping our end of God’s covenant or living selfishly. The choice is ours.

The Israelites had a choice too; they chose the zoo. They said that they didn’t want to experience God directly (Exodus 20:19). After just experiencing the great, majestic, life-changing power of God, the chosen people chose safety. Instead of flying free and experiencing the world as God intended, they chose separation between themselves and God. Instead of majesty and beauty, they chose the cage. It’s like they said, “We don’t want you, God. We want someone else to be between you and ourselves. We want a zookeeper to feed us. We want the safety and security of a cage.”

God wants His people to know Him. When we know Him, we will know His voice. We will be able to act during His timing, properly discerning when to move and how to move. We will serve and not grow weary. As we grow in our relationship with God, we begin to know Him so well that we can distinguish His voice through the siren calls of our culture.

But the Israelites chose to not know God. And because of that, they missed out. They missed the beauty. They missed the majesty. They missed His glory.

Sometimes we do likewise. And we miss His beauty, His majesty, and His glory.

Are you flying?

Or are you an eagle at a cage in the zoo? The cage is always left open. Just open your wings and fly like you were always intended to.