Your Problem Isn't Sin — Broken & Hopeful
My mentor told a story of a pastor who had in his church a young man wracked with guilt every Sunday. Every week, the man would walk to the front to confess his mistakes for the week, recommitting to God and to trying again the next week.. The pastor had finally had enough, and meant to call him out the following Sunday. As he stood at the front, the young man rose and began his weekly trip to tell the pastor about his mess-ups. And God spoke to the pastor and told him to tell the young man, “You can come again, and again, and again. I will never tire of you coming to me.” The pastor was overcome with the beauty of the forgiveness and compassion of God for this man.
I talk to many people each week, and often it can become a confessional of how they feel they have failed. The communication in many Christian circles has been one of obsession with sin, condemnation for wrong-doing and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps to try to make God happy again. I don’t believe this is Biblical, though. Jesus is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He says that apart from Him you can do nothing. He talks of how he forgets your sin, and throws it as far as the east is from the west. He talk of forgiving over and over, without resentment or demand.
Sin is not what keeps people from God—pride and unbelief does that. Sin has been dealt with on the cross with the blood of Jesus. It’s the pride of feeling I must do everything independently, including “being good” even when the standard for good is one which I cannot attain. It’s also the relentless unbelief that God doesn’t work to pursue me or want me—it is all up to me to live life in a way that pleases Him. So, we carry on trying harder, trying again and working ourselves into a depressing frenzy of self-torture.
Now, I’m not for one minute saying that sin is ok. Please hear me on that. But I haven’t yet met a person who focused on their sin enough to get rid of it. I always think of those monks who beat themselves with reeds until their backs were bloody, trying to give themselves enough scars to remind them never to do or think whatever they had done or thought again. Meantime, Jesus holds out His hands and says—just come to me.
His normal Life is one of pleasing God. The desire for sin is gone because we realize it doesn’t satisfy or give us what we want. We still may act it out, but it is hopefully with the recognition that we don’t need to be enslaved to it anymore. God wants more than anything a heart attuned to Him. And sometimes the humility found in sinning over and over puts us in a great place to receive Him. We recognize without a doubt that living out of any sort of strength we feel we have is not enough—we need His Life pouring out of us to do anything good.
I love the freedom in this. We don’t need to walk around saturated in guilt, waiting with bated breath for the next screw-up from which we need to run away. We walk in the power of Jesus, knowing full well we don’t have enough strength in our flesh to deal with sin. But also, we are convinced that we are more than conquerors through Christ who loves us.
Another thing my teacher Mike Wells used to say was, “When you fall, you either fall into God or away from God.” It isn’t an “if you fall” but a “when you fall.” And when you fall, you can fall into God, drawing near to Him for your very breath and life. Or you can fall away from Him into self-loathing, bitterness, judgment of others and the like.
You have everything you need to live in a way that is pleasing to God within you in the Life of Christ. Sin isn’t your problem. You need the humility and faith to believe God is at work in your life, and He will be enough for each scenario when you are not.
What a relief! I love it when I choose to live this way. No pressure, no guilt, no shame. Just moment-by-moment walking with Jesus.
Yet even in the midst of all these things, we triumph over them all, for God has made us to be more than conquerors, and his demonstrated love is our glorious victory over everything! So now I live with the confidence that there is nothing in the universe with the power to separate us from God’s love. I’m convinced that his love will triumph over death, life’s troubles, fallen angels, or dark rulers in the heavens. There is nothing in our present or future circumstances that can weaken his love. There is no power above us or beneath us—no power that could ever be found in the universe that can distance us from God’s passionate love, which is lavished upon us through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One! Romans 8:37-39
