The Lord's Prayer

Destructive sin

Have you ever mixed up salt and sugar?

As a practical joke, I’ve seen sugar replaced by salt. Thankfully I haven’t put sugar in my coffee for a long time, but for the poor unsuspecting coffee drinker who enjoys that extra teaspoon of sugar… well, let’s just say their coffee was ruined.

Now, it’s interesting isn’t it… a teaspoon compared with a whole cup of liquid might seem insignificant, but yet it quickly spreads and it makes such a massive difference.

Today, we’re going to be talking about sin. There are going to be some sins that will obviously make a huge difference in our lives. I’m thinking of what we might call the big ugly sins. I’m thinking about things like murder and rape, or large scale theft. It’s clear how these will effect the lives of affected by it.

But what about the smaller scale stuff. Things like the envy we carry within us, or the lust, or hatred. Perhaps we’ve got sufficient self-control that we manage not to let it boil into something much bigger.

Is this kind of sin destructive?

Well, the type of destruction might be quite different in some ways, however, I want to suggest it can be a little like the cup of coffee with a teaspoon of salt. It might look okay on the surface, but it’s undrinkable.

You see, that so-called smaller sins have this tendency to fester inside us. When it’s not dealt with, it flows into different parts of our lives. It changes how we think, and when our thought is changed, our actions change.

What is the sin in your life? The reality is, you’ll possibly be able to identify some parts of your life that are sinful.

But here’s the thing… to some degree each of us sin in ways that is not intentional, and usually not aware of initially… possibly sometimes we never become aware.

It is really easy to minimise this kind of sin. Particularly if we intended well.

You see, here’s the thing… some times those sins that are unintentional and that we’re unaware of are actually of the type where we’re having a nasty attitude towards someone else. In our minds, we feel totally justified, after all, you’ve seen what they’re up to.

Now, what happens when these unloving attitudes go unchecked?

It starts acting like a cancer. It breeds further discontent. It becomes anger. It invites envy and jealousy.

It starts tearing relationships apart, and puts a wedge in communities.

That sinful attitude you had might not have seemed like much, but left unchecked, it can contribute to the tearing apart of a community.

So what do we do about such sin?

As Christians we know we’re forgiven… that Christ died for our sins. And that is true, for the believer who has asked Jesus into their hearts, your sins will not count against you when you face that final judgement - but… (and this is an important clarification we need to realise)… the sin in your life can continue to be destructive even for the forgiven believer.

I just want to make this clear - the believer does not lose their salvation every time they sin. The salvation you received when you first believed is good for all time. But this side of the return of Christ, our sinful nature will co-exist in our transformed lives. And it is this sinful nature within us that I want to think about how we deal with it.

Leviticus

Okay, well, while we ponder this question, I’m going to do what I essentially did last week. We’re going to take a step back into the early period of Israel when the Lord was setting up the way this new nation was to relate to him.

This was a time before Jesus has come to earth - but what we’ll see is that understanding what is happening here will help us understand what Jesus actually did for us.

So, we’ll explore first what is going on for these people and the requirements they had to go through, before we come back to the question that I posed a moment ago - what do we do with the sin in our lives today?

Now, a bit of context… these instructions are coming to Moses while the Israelites are out wandering around the wilderness.

You probably know the story, but let me briefly re-cap.

After Yahweh miraculously brings them out of Egypt, they have a journey through the wilderness. They’re going to spend 40 years in the wilderness, although it’s actually not until we get to the book of Numbers (which comes after Leviticus), that we’re told the story explaining why they need to wander for longer.

But even at this point in the story, this new community of wandering people already show early signs of fraying.

It shouldn’t be surprising. The sinfulness of humanity means that if you get enough people together, there will eventually be conflict and tension in one form or another.

Well, as we get to the book of Leviticus, the first three chapters which we looked at last week were free will offerings that people can make so that they can choose to make themselves appropriate to approach a holy God. The three offerings we saw were the burnt offering, the grain offering and the fellowship offering.

But today we move onto both the sin offering and the guilt offering - two offerings that on initial glance are going to seem very similar, but we’ll tease out the difference as we go along.

But with these sin and guilt offerings, what we’re going to see is that God is creating a system whereby the things that threaten to tear them apart are going to be dealt with appropriately.

You see, sometimes we might wonder why God cares so much about sin. We need to realise that he hasn’t just created a bunch of arbitary rules as some some of show of power. The laws he created was because he wants a relationship with us and he wants us to have good relationship with those around us.

When we sin, we’re breaking relationship with both God and those around us. This is why we need a system to help us deal with this problem.

The Sin Offering

Well, chapter 4 opens with the Lord speaking to Moses again, and the opening line in verse 2 shows that what is going to come next will include all people and it’s specifically thinking about the unintentional sin.

So an unintentional sin is where someone isn’t setting out to go against what God has asked. Perhaps they don’t have a clear grasp of what God has expected of them, or perhaps they’re just unaware that what they are doing is a violation of it. Whatever the case, we’re about to hear what they are to do.

Now, if you skim your way through chapter 4 and in particular pay attention to the start of each paragraph, you’ll see that four different groups are going to come into focus.

In verse 3, it’s if an anointed priest sins. This category is very significant, because the anointed priest should be the one showing spiritual leadership - their sin has a potent effect on the rest of the community.

We get the second group in verse 13 - this time it’s if the whole community sins. Sometimes we can think of sin only in terms of what an individual does. But sometimes communities can operate in ways that are disrespectful to others, sometimes even harmful. When a community is acting in a sinful way, even if it is not every single inidividual within that community, then the response should be done as a community as well.

The third group comes in verse 22 - this time it’s when one of the community leaders sins. Now, we saw in the first grouping, the priest has a spiritual leadership to the community. In this group, they might not have spiritual leadership, but the leadership role in the community means their sin is going to have quite a significant flow on effect as well.

And the fourth grouping then comes in verse 27, and this time is is any other member of the community. They might not have a leadership role, but the sin of anyone can effect a community.

Now, with each category, there is some similarity with what they should do. In each, there is a sacrifice that is to be made. The priest and the whole community - it needs to be a bull. This is a costly sacrifice. For the community leader its a male goat, and for the commoner its a female goat or lamb.

Now we do get more details in chapter 5, in particular showing that there are options for the individual that can’t afford a goat or lamb. There are options for some doves or pidgeons, or if even that’s too much, some flour.

But you don’t go the cheap option if you can afford it. That’s because there is meant to be a cost to this. It’s a reminder that when you do something wrong to either God or fellow humans, even when you didn’t intend to… there is a cost associated with it. For justice to be done, there needs to be payment.

But then here’s the thing that we see here… when this payment is made in the way prescribed by God - atonement is achieved. That is, the sin is purged. It stops having that destructive effect we talked about earlier. Their is real forgiveness.

Guilt offering

Okay, well let’s leave this sin offering for now, and jump back down to chapter 5 verse 14 and we’re going to find what we call a guilt offering.

Now, on first reading, you might wonder what the difference is between the sin offering and the guilt offering.

The main difference is that these sins require reparations. The sin offerings by contrast, were more concerned with matters that defiled someone or a group and thereby purification was required, but here, there is some kind of damage that requires compensation.

For the guilt offering, there still is a sacrifice very similar to the sin offering, but this time they also need to compensate whatever damage was done, and… add a fifth of the value to it. In other words, paying back 120% of what the damage was.

Application

Now, we could explore all of this in much more detail, but I want to get back to the question I posed earlier - what about us? When we sin, what is the appropriate action that we should take?

As I mentioned earlier, there can be a temptation to just say because we’ve been forgiven by Jesus, then our sin has already been dealt with - but this is to ignore the destructive force our sin can have in our community and in our relationship to God.

But, like last week, I’m also not going to suggest the sacrifices listed here are the method we need to start employing - indeed, animal sacrifices are not part of the approach we take since the time of Jesus.

Acknowledging our sin

The first thing we need to do is acknowledge our sin.

Now, you might recognise a big problem with this, particularly as we’ve spent a bit of time thinking about the unintentional sins and the one’s we’re not aware of. If we’re unaware of them, it’s hard to acknowledge them.

So, the first task is to actually allow ourselves the space to recognise where we have sinned.

This can be really hard. We’re usually much better at picking the sins of others, but usually feel what we’ve done is justified.

So what do we do?

Firstly, in your prayers, ask God to reveal in you anything impure.

If you do that, (and I would encourage you to do so), but then you need to listen. It probably won’t be an audible voice, although God can talk to you in whatever fashion he chooses to… but you might find yourself going through things you’ve done in the past. You can start asking yourself, did I act in a way that honoured God, or was I being selfish in what I did?

Think about the assumptions you made… did you make assumptions based on prejuiced ideas?

Did you unfairly make judgements on people that were not warranted?

So allowing yourself this reflective time before God is a good place to start. But also… reflect on those around you.

Are people hurting because of actions you took? If so, have you taken the time to understand why?

It can be easy to think - well they must be just overly sensitive, but this is where we need to be seeing if there might actually be a unintentional sin in our life. We have to allow the possiblity that maybe I was in the wrong.

We need to listen when others might reveal some sin in our life. If someone suggests we might actually be in the wrong in a certain situation, our natural inclination is to become defensive. But we need to coutneract our defensive reflex.

Now, it might be that you are justified in the actions you took, but please, take the time to consider the possibility that you weren’t. Bring it before God in a prayerful and considered way.

Repent

Once sin is revealed and we’ve acknowledged it, we need to repent.

Thankfully, because Jesus was the sacrifice for us, we don’t need to sacrifice an animal, but yet we do need to hand over the sinfulness.

One of the elements of the sacrifice that I didn’t draw your attention to earlier, is that the guilty party, or a representative of the guilty group was to lay hands on the animal that was to be sacrificed. There was effectively a tranmission of guilt.

Now that might sound like a strange concept, but this symbolic act worked in a very real and powerful way.

Can I suggest for us, we can use symbolic measures as we deal with our sin.

You can write down your sin on a bit of paper, and then have some symbolic way of getting rid of it - for example, throw it in a fire.

The sin needs to be removed, because while it remains it is going to continue to cause havoc in your relationship with God and within the community.

Reparations

So we’ve acknowledged our sin. We’ve repented and possibly symbolically got rid of it.

From the guilt offering, we also need to recognise whether we need to make any reparations.

Did you take something that was not yours to take?

Have you caused damage to someone’s property?

If it’s phyisical damage or loss, it might be relatively simple to figure out what you need to pay back. Do you need to add the 20%?

I’d suggest this 20% isn’t something we should take a legalistic approach to - rather, I’d suggest if you’ve wronged someone, be generous in the way you pay them back.

This is a lot harder when it’s not a phyiscal loss, but rather something like a reputational loss. Now I know that lawyers in civil cases today will put a dollar figure to things like this - but I don’t think this is necessarily the path we should be taking.

Rather we should be praying about ways in which we can be generous to the person we’ve wronged.

Our church

Before I finish, I just want to address what has been happening in our church here at Tanilba Bay Baptist. Now, I’m not going to get into specifics, but over the last year or two, there have been various rumblings of discontent from various fronts.

The easiest thing to do is to point the finger at other people.

But I think it is important that rather than doing that, we each take the time to see in what way you might have contributed to some of the unease - and just to be clear, I include myself in this as well.

Are there things that you need to repent?

Are there ways in which you can contribute towards healing?

The beautiful thing is that God is a God of redemption. He has made a way that where sin blocks a way, a path forward can be made.

Ultimately for us as believers in Jesus Christ, he has made this all possible for us.

I believe something special is happening here in this church, but also that the evil one wants to put a stop to things. We will not beat the evil one by just trying hard, but rather in submitting to God, and doing things God’s way.

Conclusion

What we need to learn from this section of Leviticus is that sin in the life of an individual and in the life of a community needs to be taken very seriously.

Thankfully, God has given us what we need, but it is going to take a whole lot of humility for us to acknowledge that we can’t do it on our own, but only in the strength of God.

Let me pray...