(This will not be about specific sins.) I know this may stir up controversy, but I've been having my thoughts challenged lately and I wanted to just try to get them out. It may be a bit jumbled, but I just want to share my thoughts and see if anyone else wants to chime in. I'm in process. I am in no way saying the traditional thoughts on sin are wrong, so please no one jump all over me for not including that. I just want to share some other thoughts that I think may be also true. I think it's a both / and as my Pastor Norm always said. :)
I think common thought is that sin is a verb. Our actions are sinful. We do bad things and that is sin. OK, so that is true.... but I'm seeing something beyond that.
We treat sin as this huge thing and imply that if you do something wrong that God will want nothing to do with you, but yet we see Jesus (the perfect representation of God) eating with sinners and hanging out with them all the time. (Luke 15:2 for one)
But look at John 8:34 - Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin -- So now sin has become a noun, it is sort of personified here as some sort of entity that can enslave us. Also in Acts 8:23, Romans 3:9, Romans 7:8 But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead.
Sin came into the world thru the disobedience of one man.
1 Tim 2:14 - And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
Eve didn't have the sin nature - she walked directly with God and yet when the serpent showed up, she was deceived. She was not a slave to sin, but when it appeared, she followed it. (again personified) The teaching I have heard about this incident was that she was not so much guilty of disobedience, but of following a different master. That was the big no-no.
Acts 13:39-39 tells us that only Jesus can set us free from sin, not the law of Moses. So knowing the law and keeping it doesn't keep us free from sin as some people seem to think. Also Romans 3:20,
In the context of what Jesus did on the cross... Romans 6:6 offers us our freedom from this slavery. The old body ruled by sin is done away with so we are no longer slaves to sin. Romans 6:12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. --- So now we have a choice.
Romans 7 offers up a discourse on being a slave to the sin living inside us and wanting to do good but failing. This is the battle we are all familiar with. We believe one thing and often find ourselves doing the opposite.
Romans 8:3 - For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh,
1 John 3:9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God. -- That's a tough one, but if you look at being born of God as a continual lifelong process, you could say that certain areas are not yet born of God.
OK - those are a bunch of passages I found to sort of get to my point. I don't think I found the one that directly said what I was thinking though. (I've been thinking on this for awhile, but for this blog I just searched sin on a Bible site)
So if sin is more of an outside influence, and without Christ we are a slave to it, then when Jesus died to set us free from sin, He went to war against this "entity" called sin. It is a deceiver who is constantly trying to trick us or convince us that God's way is not the best way. He's been at it for a very long time and is pretty good at his lies.
Bill Johnson has said that "it is impossible for a Christian to sin apart from believing a lie." That is a controversial statement to church people I'm sure, but I think it is true. If we have been born again, then the Bible says we have been set free from the power of sin, and it says we will not continue to sin if we're born of God. So is the Bible wrong? Or is our understanding wrong? If I look really closely at my life and my sins, I have to agree with Bill.
How about when Jesus was being tempted by Satan. He was offered good things, things that were meant for Him to have, but Satan offered shortcuts to those good things. He offered another path. Basically implying that God's way isn't the best way. Kind of the same thing he said to Eve.
Why do we fear the future? Because we are believing a lie that says God won't protect us and doesn't have the best plan for us. Almost always, I can see that beneath it all, the excuses, the fears, is the idea that God isn't really good. If we truly believed 100% that God is good in every situation, we would never sin. We would walk according to the Spirit as we were initially intended. God started off this whole world with 2 people in a Garden just hanging out with Him all day. They broke that by listening to another voice. Things got harder for humanity after that. Jesus restored us to the possibility of constant connection to Father.
Jesus died to claim victory over the power of sin, to give us the reconnect we needed to live the way He intended.
If all this is true, why are we always shouting at "sinners" to change their ways? They can't. Apart from relationship with Jesus, they can't change. A few will try and succeed, but for the most part, they don't have the power to break free of sin on their own.
I still sin in my life, and I am constantly in search of the truth that will set me free. I believe God enough to be convinced that His way is better than mine, but I still struggle to trust Him completely, therefore I still sin. When I do I try to see the lie, or have the body of Christ help me to find the lie. We are meant to live in community for this very reason I believe. To help each other see where we are deceived. That's the nature of deception. We can't see it. Victory comes in being connected to the body in which we are placed.
Sin is our enemy, not our actions. To win the battles we must seek Jesus and His truth instead of focusing on the sin. We give it power when we focus on it (not to mention coming under condemnation - which is not of God). I learned that the hard way, suffering for 15 yrs completely focused on one area of my life that was not ok with me. When I finally got the memo to focus on Jesus, that thing has just fallen away and disappeared!! What if we all were able to do that and help others to do it? Hmmmm.... I think that is the message of the gospel. Focus on Jesus, seek first the Kingdom, and sin will pass away and we will have the life we were meant to have. :)
Again, this is my thoughts in process. I am not claiming it to be ultimate truth, just pondering and trying to find truth. I welcome input.
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