When I was first introduced to the gospel, Sin was defined for me as actions or thoughts that were against God’s law. Belief referred to believing that Christ died for my sins, and Salvation was defined as being saved from eternal punishment.
I learned that the important steps to growing as a Christian were to read the Bible, pray, witness, go to church, and live a holy life.
This is a true and simple presentation of the gospel, but sometimes I think the gospel gets made so simple that is loses everything that is beautiful and powerful about it. The gospel is so much bigger. I think that by simplifying it, we lose out on the fuller concepts. It is the fuller concepts of Sin, Salvation and Belief that have changed my life.
Sin
In the garden, Eve’s sin was not just eating the fruit when she was told not to. Her sin started when she believed that she could find wisdom and life apart from God. The action was a result of something much deeper at work, believing the lie.
We were designed to be dependent upon God for affection, wisdom, leadership, protection, and Life. The beginning of all sin is believing that we can find a source of Life, other than God. We allow sin in when we believe that we know, better than God, how to live an abundant and meaningful life. We sin when we don’t trust God with our lives. All of our sin actions flow out of our sin beliefs.
When we overlook sin at the level of belief, we are missing the root of our sin actions. How will we ever change our actions if we don’t discover our beliefs and examine them? And what good is managing our actions on the outside, if we are still not experiencing abundant Life, because of our faulty beliefs that we hold on the inside?
Sin is far more than immoral thoughts and behaviors. Sin encompasses everything that we believe, think, or do that is not in accordance with our original design. Sin includes all of our values, pursuits, aspirations, anything and everything that is even slightly off from what God had in mind for us. Sin is all of the ways that we are deceived, and how we live out that deception. All lies lead to death, not life. Sin is the influence that we let in, that leads to death not life. We all struggle every single day with looking to sources other than God for life. We try to find love, significance, affirmation and security from sources like our parents, spouses, jobs, and children, just to name a few. We do this in small ways, like wishing that we would get more respect, affection, praise, or appreciation. Even if we control our behavior and don’t do any action that is listed in the Bible as sin, the belief that we could find life in these things rather than God, is, in a very real sense, living in sin.
The simple definition of sin is a clear, black-and-white list of do’s and don’ts. It is easy to mistakenly believe that if we are following all of these rules, then we are living without sin. But if we don’t depend on God, then the essence of sin is at work deep in our soul, and we are still not receiving life or living in a way that brings life. Living a good Christian life devoid of a dependent connection with God is not living a good Christian life, it is living a good moral life. Salvation from sin is not merely salvation from the sin actions, but the sin attitude of self-reliance in any given moment. If we ever want to experience abundant life, we need to acknowledge the spiritual battle over our daily beliefs that keep us from looking to The Source.
There will never be a point in time where I will be able to claim to be without sin. We have way more sin in our lives than a list of rules could ever uncover.
Now don’t think I am trying to say that because we are more sinful than we used to believe, that we should feel more judgement or shame than we did before. As Christians, there is no need for experiencing judgment or shame in the first place. Jesus took away our shame completely, once and for all, when he died on the cross.
Rather than thinking of sin in terms of making you good or bad, think of Sin in terms of making you dead or alive. I am saying that we are actually more dead than we thought, not more evil than we thought. God wants to save us from our sin which encompasses all of our false beliefs and empty pursuits, and He desires instead to give us Life; a life that He had designed for us all along, a Life that flows from a deep connection to, and dependence on, His Life-giving Spirit; the Spirit who is working in our hearts to nourish and transform.
See the following Blog for an exploration of the concept of Belief.
