The Problem of Sin
The Way of Jesus • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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It’s the first Sunday in the season of Lent. We began it on Wednesday, with ashes on our forehead, which was a reminder to us that we are mortal, our lives are brief, and those ashes are a calling to return to God and seek him with all of our heart.
And in Lent we are going to continue in our series the Way of Jesus, we’re going to keep looking at what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus. To be with him, become like him, and do as he did. And I can tell that so many of us are diving into this stuff, taking our spiritual life more seriously, being more intentional about it, because we want to be closer to Jesus.
But what we are going to get into today, it’s kind of the hard part, this is the thing that we WILL discover as we follow Jesus. It’s the problem that we all face, it’s the great roadblock to our discipleship, it’s the ancient catastrophe that we carry with us. It’s what the Bible calls sin.
SIN: Missing the mark of who God calls us to be
We have a little bit of hesitancy about this word these days, because no one wants to appear judgmental; sometimes the word sin makes us put up our defenses…but we don’t need to feel that way. Sin is really just the mater-of-fact description of what’s going on with humanity.
Sin is pointing to a very observable idea, that something is very, very wrong with the way we live and treat each other. Something is wrong with our hearts. The one thing that religions have in common, that all philosophies have in common, that worldviews have in common, is that humanity has a problem, there is something deeply wrong with us. We don’t always agree on what it is or why we have this problem, but we all can sense it, we all intuitively know that something has gone wrong, we sense the evil and the shame and pain in this world that we cause.
And so when the Bible talks about sin, at the root of what that word usually means in the Hebrew and the Greek, is something like missing the mark. If you are an archer attacking an enemy, sinning would be not hitting the target. And so when we sin, we are missing the mark of what were created to be. Genesis 1 and 2 tells us that humanity was made in the image of God; our purpose as a human being is to bear God’s image, meaning we are supposed to reflect the glory of God the Creator to the creation. And when we sin, this means we are failing to be a human being; this means we are failing to bear God’s image.
I want us to be comfortable talking about sin; it needs to become a category we can spot, that we can talk about at, that we can recognize around us, and that we can face head on as the enemy of our spiritual growth.
I want to talk today about three different kinds of sin, the source of sin, and ways we can begin to be healed of sin.
Sin done by us
This is probably the kind of sin we are most familiar with. These are the habits and choices that we make, that go against God’s will for our life. We will in the spiritual life struggle against this.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Sin done to us
This is a component of sin that we sometimes don’t acknowledge as much. The very true cliche says that hurt people hurt people; broken people break other people; and as we sin against God we also sin against each other, and people sin against us. This could be abandonment, betrayal, abuse, violence, someone who belittles you or mocks you, and you end up wounded. You can end up bitter, full of hate, for what someone did to you. Allowing God to address how you were sinned against, trusting God’s healing in this part of your life, for many of us, this is going to be the most important and most challenging part of our apprenticeship to Jesus. But it is a huge component of sin in our life, the sin that is done to us.
Sin done around us
This is the environment of sin, the air we breathe. It’s kind of like secondhand smoke; we live in a culture of sin, a culture that is constantly wooing us and persuading us to reject God. And at times this is kind of like a power over us. And it’s really important to get that sin is only only wrong choices that we choose; it’s not only giving in to temptation; it’s not only sinful habits that we have adopted; sin is those things, but sin is also a power that can take hold of our life, a power that can take hold of culture, a power that can take hold of entire nations.
Struggling against sin is a normal part of following Jesus.
If you are an apprentice of Jesus, he is really clear that you are going to face temptation; you are going to struggle internally; Paul calls it a war between the Spirit and the Flesh. Jesus teaches us to pray to God, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Temptation is to be expected.
You are not weird and should not be ashamed if you are battling temptation over some kind of sin in your life, this is to be expected. If you aren’t, then you probably just aren’t aware of your sin.
And this may happen because as we mature in our faith, often times we are able to overcome temptation to more obvious sins, sins of sexual immorality, cheating on our spouse, watching pornography, promiscuity; sins of violence, physically hurting someone or just meanly yelling at people and insulting them; drunkenness, doing drugs, spending all our money on gambling, etc. These are sins, and there’s no place for these things as a Christian. But as an apprentice of Jesus, we can move beyond those things and have deeper temptation; sin that is more below the surface. Sins of what we fail to do; sins of motivation; sins of idolatry, loving things more than God. Sins of pride, envy, unforgiveness, greed, sloth, gluttony. And these less obvious sins can have more devastating consequences for our souls. And we will continue to struggle against them, and the closer we get to Jesus, the more we become like Jesus, the more aware we will become of our sinfulness, the more humble we will become.
And so sin should be expected, it should be faced, it should be addressed. But the next question is like, how do we address it?
The question is, how does the sin in our heart get dealt with?
We go to the great physician, Jesus.
On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Jesus talks about sin like a disease, an illness, that needs to be cured. And Jesus, like a good doctor, doesn’t want to just treat the symptoms, he wants to treat the problem.
Anecdote: Man with a waters stain in his ceiling, and he keeps painting over it; again and again, he keeps painting over it; until, finally, he goes up to his attic and sees that there’s a leak in his roof. He fixes the roof, and the leak stops happening.
This is what happens so often in our struggle against sin; we fight all we can against the symptoms, we paint over the ceiling leak; we say we are never going to do this again; but then, there we go, we do it again. Jesus wants to address the root problem, and the problem is this: it’s the human heart.
esus is quite clear on what the problem is, on where sin comes from. It comes from the human heart. That’s our problem.
The Source of Sin: The human heart
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
He went on: “What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.”
Jesus’ preaching is not about behavior modification;
it’s about heart transformation.
The cross is how Jesus saved us from our sins.
The Cross deals with the consequences of our sin, defeats the power of sin, and makes it possible for you and I to become a new creation.
Confession is how God transforms our hearts.
Confession in Jesus as our Lord and Savior
…because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
2. Confession of Sin to one another
Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
"He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone. But it is the grace of the gospel which is so hard for the pious to understand, that it confronts us with the truth and says: You are a sinner, a great, desperate sinner; now come, as the sinner you are, to the God who loves you." -Dietrich Boenhoeffer
"Without confession, we are left only with ourselves, trying desperately to maintain a false image. But in confession, the light of Christ exposes our darkness, and we are healed.” -Richard Foster
Practice this week:
find someone you trust, and practice confession with them.
