3 Things You Need to Know About Sin

After reading some recent reports in the news, these 3 big ideas came to mind about sin.

1. Confront Sin

Sin can be in word, thought, and deed (sins of commission) or by not doing what you should do (sins of omission). Sin is not neutral; it ultimately destroys and never leads to life (Gen. 4:7;Rom 8:1-8; 1 Peter 5:8). As John Owen famously said, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.” 

Sadly, we see the sins of omission every day:

  • We see it in friendships when people gossip about the dumb stuff their friend is doing rather than having the hard talk with the person.
  • We see it in small groups when they enable each other to stay on the surface and never get down to real, heart-level issues. After being in a group together for years, adultery, porn addiction, abuse, and any number of other things can sinfully be allowed to exist for the sake of comfort.
  • We see it in marriage counseling, most often in husbands. The husband’s sin of passive omission can lead his family into debt, his wife into committing adultery, or his wife into never receiving the care she needs for sin committed against her in childhood.

Loving Jesus, loving your spouse, loving your friends, loving your people looks like confronting sin with truth and love. There is no greater contempt for someone than to leave them in their sin.

You’ve got to confront sin in yourself (Rom 8:1-11), in your spouse (Gen 3), and in your friends (Gal 2:11-14).

2. Sin Will Come Out

Sin always comes out. 1 Timothy 5:24-25 says this, “The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. So also good works are conspicuous, and even those that are not cannot remain hidden.”

In our era of reputation management and people pleasing, we need to see this. Sin, either because it seeks to destroy or because God will use it to discipline us, will come out. Some people’s sin is flagrant, they wear it on their face. Other people’s sin comes out years down the road, when they least expect it.

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Your sins do not define you. Your identity is as a redeemed, reconciled, justified, cleansed son or daughter of our loving Father.

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Many men stand idly by, like their father Adam, believing the lies that if they just ignore it, it will go away. They can just deal with it next time it comes up or “it’s just how the other person is.” At the bottom of it all is selfishness and the idol of comfort. It does not love the person the way the cross shows us to. The cross shows us that God saves by first condemning, God heals by first wounding, God builds up by first crushing, God makes alive by first killing. You cannot get to the gospel without suffering, and trying to circumvent that is what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” The sin of omission is giving someone else cheap grace. It belittles both sin and Jesus. 

3. Jesus Killed Sin

That’s the incredible thing about Jesus: he killed sin. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, he lived the only perfect, sinless life. At the cross, he paid the penalty for our sin to redeem us from sin’s bondage, reconcile us from sin’s estrangement, justify us from sin’s guilt, and cleanse us from sin’s filth. 

More so, through the gift of a new heart and the presence of the Holy Spirit, it is his kindness that convicts us of sin and leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). It is the Father’s love that disciplines us (Hebrews 12:7-11). Jesus doesn’t passively show us contempt, he actively shows us love. Better yet, when we confess those sins, we receive forgiveness and cleansing from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). 

Because of that, you, if you are a Christian, have freedom from the fear, shame, and condemnation of sin. Your sins and the sins done against you do not define you. Your identity is as a redeemed, reconciled, justified, cleansed son or daughter of our loving Father. You can be bold in confessing and confronting real sin because the grace God gives is real.

What We Can Do To Kill Sin Before It Kills Us

  1. Be with Jesus. The Holy Spirit is faithful to work through the word, whether it is read or preached. A bold prayer could be, “Jesus, show me the things I need to repent of and the people I need to repent to (Ps. 139)”
  2. Be in community. Pastor Brad House has a good post on this here. 
  3. Create a culture where the truth is told and heard. Nathan Burke has a great post on this here. 

This post originally appeared on the Resurgence.

The cross, that is, is not quiescent or dead. The cross is itself in the first instance the attack of God on the old sinner and the sinner’s theology. The cross is the doing of God to us. But that same cross itself, and only the cross, at the same time opens a new and unheard-of possibility over against the sinner’s old self and its theology. That means that a theology of the cross is inevitably quite polemical. It constantly seeks to uncover and expose the ways in which sinners hide the perfidy behind pious facades. The delicate thing about it is that it attacks the best we have to offer, not the worst…The preacher-theologian must know this and learn how to use the word of the cross in that combat.

Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross

Five favorite books?

Great question. Here are the ones that come to my head in no particular order.

On Being a Theologian of the Cross by Gerhard Forde. Highly, highly recommend this one. It’s a commentary on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation that shows the difference between a theologian of the cross and a theologian of glory - in our words, religion vs. the gospel. Powerful and devastating.

The Courage to be Protestant by David Wells. His first four books coalesced into an incredibly helpful critique of church and culture. Wells is a sociological theologian.

The Bondage of the Will by Martin Luther. Most people know Luther for the Five Solas, the Protestant view of salvation. What, unfortunately, most people don’t know is how that is applied. The Bondage of the Will is what he called “the hinge upon which everything turns”. He also said that if all of his writings were burned but one survived, he’d wish it was The Bondage of the Will. J.I. Packer’s intro is worth the price of the book alone.

Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman was a writer for SPIN, Esquire, and, I believe now, ESPN. Has some entertaining and sharp insights into culture.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I read this in my early 20s and had never seen someone write with such power. The way he uses words and the way he can paint scenes is really unique. It is a fictionalized autobiography about how both of his parents died when he was 21 and he had to raise his 11 year old brother. This book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Eggers went on to write other highly acclaimed books as well as the script for Where The Wild Things Are. Lastly, he art directed Thrice’s album Vheissu.

Bonus:

Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper. I think anyone in the church in their 20s should read this.

What about you?

While Kim and I were in New York this week we stopped by Strand Bookstore - if you’ve never been there, you need to go next time you’re in the city - and I came across this great find. It’s an out of print collection of Luther’s theology. It’s by no means exhaustive but it is a great collection of his writing on central topics like the bondage of the will, the preaching of the church, the missionary message of the church, the nature of God, the nature of man, and the person and work of Christ. The best comparison I can think of is that it is like his Table Talk meeting a systematic theology. It is out of print but you can still pick up a few used copies on Amazon.

While Kim and I were in New York this week we stopped by Strand Bookstore - if you’ve never been there, you need to go next time you’re in the city - and I came across this great find. It’s an out of print collection of Luther’s theology. It’s by no means exhaustive but it is a great collection of his writing on central topics like the bondage of the will, the preaching of the church, the missionary message of the church, the nature of God, the nature of man, and the person and work of Christ. The best comparison I can think of is that it is like his Table Talk meeting a systematic theology.

It is out of print but you can still pick up a few used copies on Amazon.

Most people, if they have really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we have grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality. I think everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the hotels and scenery may have been excellent, and chemistry may be a very interesting job: but something has evaded us.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

* Students learn only a small part of what you teach them. They learn what teachers are excited about, what they talk about all the time.

* If you merely assume the gospel while being excited about implications of the gospel, then the next generation may not even assume the gospel. Keep central what is central.
DA Carson on The Gospel & Social Action.
Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.
Diedrich Bonhoeffer quoted by Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, page 85