Welcome to the world of trying to KILL YOU SIN before it KILLS YOU!! At Hope, we are now in a 10 week sermon series using John Owen's Mortification of Sin. To start out the series, today's message was a Biblical Theology of sin click here to listen the message. I challenged the whole church afterwards to think through a thorough definition of sin and to post it here as a comment. Short or long, we'd love to hear what you all are thinking.If you would like a copy of the powerpoint click here.
For a copy of the sermon notes, click here.
I'll be in Orlando all week, but I will be commenting and reading as well. Have a great week, and KILL SIN!!
Trike
12 comments:
Today during the sermon I misheard "lawlessness" as "lovelessness." But I think that is essentially us saying to God, "I don't love You enough to do what you have declared is best." Oh man, can you say OUCH?!
I have got to get this down on paper before it leaves my mind. I wanted to drop it on the blog, but I didn't know how to see the particular one on sin...
When I think of Satan and sin, and how it is tricky, and how it is crouching to take us, I always think of the documentary, The Smartest Men in the Room. You have two men at the top of an organization with thousands of employees relying on them to continue supplying their paychecks every other week. The two men at the top become filthy rich, and the people in their organization begin to suffer. The employees are video taped in meetings where they're told everything is ok and if they keep doing what they're doing, all will be fine. Then everything collapses and the people are left walking out of the building with cardboard boxes. On that day, how foolish would I have felt if I believed the lies I was being fed? How would you have felt if you did not have the wisdom to see through the smoke and mirrors to the fact that, if you didn't start interviewing and moving your 401k to another company, you'd have nothing saved for retirement, and the people you feed every day, would have nothing to eat?
One of the last scenes is of a man who finally found a new job, who had 250k saved up and was about to retire, and had to watch his 250k drop to 14k. He says, 'the kicker is that, even in the end when we knew the bottom had dropped out of the company, the top men locked up our stock so we couldn't sell it until they got their millions of shares out before us. All we were trying to do is put food on the table.'
Part of me wonders if in the end it will look anything like the scenario above. Will I believe the smoke and mirrors that are crouching at my door? Will I be lulled to sleep, then crushed on the last day without notice? Will I sit, broken, in the rubble as the dust settles on judgement day and overhear a conversation of satan still sticking his chest out toward God saying, 'Look, you gave Yourself for these people, and they still followed me, they turned away from You! You're still not all that, and I'm still greater than You, God.' Will I, in my life, have followed the lust of my flesh all to support the pride of someone who is simply trying to have THAT one conversation?
Will I be part of that organization? Will I continue in it and miss out on the promises, the hope, the confidence, the love, the safety, the wisdom, the MERCY, the GRACE, that God offers me, without a 'sexy' spiritual marketing scheme to draw me in? Is it really worth missing the salvation of my God, just to over eat when I want to, or to band aid the inward void with whatever means I'd like to, only to completely miss the boat?
Just thoughts... Thanks for listening.
sin lures us away from the right view of Christ.
it drives the wedge of doubt, deception, and destruction between our view of our lover and His joy over us.
it kills our hope and leads us not quite to utter despair but lesser lovers.
we all need the stream of living water, a pristine, refreshing and shimmering brook.
sin would have us sit and drink from the rank and polluted streams of lesser lovers out of fear and angst of dehydration.
however the reality is that our stream of living water is merely over the foothill of forgiveness.
it is the grace of God that wakes us up to the horror our desperate circumstances to see the mud on our lips and sewage we are wading in. it's Christ that comes in to get us even if were crying and crippled by fear.
Luke 1:67-79
Then Zachariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied,
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he came and set his people free.
He set the power of salvation in the center of our lives... Deliverance from our enemies and every hateful hand;
Mercy to our fathers, as he remembers to do what he said he'd do... Present the offer of salvation to his people, the forgiveness of their sins.
Through the heartfelt mercies of our God, God's Sunrise will break in upon us,
Shining on those in the darkness, those sitting in the shadow of death,
Then showing us the way, one foot at a time, down the path of peace.
SIN IS despising the word of the LORD by doing what is evil in his eyes; rebelling and committing treachery against the LORD; turning my back on God; uttering lies my own heart has conceived; forsaking God, the spring of living water; digging my own cisterns that cannot hold water; suppressing the truth by my own wickedness; not giving glory or thanks to God; futile thinking; a darkened heart; claiming to be wise when really a fool; exchanging the glory of the immortal God for idols; exchanging the truth of God for a lie; worshiping created things rather than the Creator; not thinking it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God; being given over to a depraved mind; doing what ought not to be done; knowing the consequences of sin but doing it anyway; falling short of the glory of God; being dragged away and enticed by my own evil desires; never unavoidable; lawlessness; waywardness; clinging to worthless idols; chasing after other lovers; not acknowledging God; ignoring the law of God; relishing in wickedness; having a spirit of prostitution that leads me astray; being unfaithful to the LORD; being satisfied, then becoming proud and forgetting God; forfeiting the grace that could be mine.
I've been wrestling with the concept of sin this week, and have tried to boil it down to a definition that is both seemingly simple enough for my mind to grasp, yet complex enough to fully grasp all of its deception.
I would define sin as: "Attempting to fill legitimate needs through illegitimate means."
It even has a bit of a poetic bounce to it =D
Sin is...Destruction.
ditto.
Is there really a need to say more? I want to accept this challenge offered up, and I sit here thinking: is it possible I could answer this question any other way?
I'm a garage-logic, keep-it-simple kind of guy, and after spending a week thinking about sin in my life, their are two distinct noticeable qualities: those sins we are aware of - and seek out - the sin we continue to be drawn to time and time again. And the sin that we fall prey to without being conscious of, more or less part of living in a fallen world.
It's all bad (HUGE understatement!), but which is worse? Is it worse that we acknowledge our sin yet continue in the same pattern. Or is it worse that we turn our back to it and pretend its not really there... as if to say: "its in our nature" and "sin is part of this world... and therefore part of me..."
And the more I learn and dive into the Bible and my faith, the more questions appear. For example, Is sin graded? There is evidence biblically that there are greater sins than others. Yet sin is still sin - all fall short of God's glory. Are their greater rewards in heaven? Will I be judged more heavily if I were to commit a more heinous crime versus, say, lying?
I haven't answered the question, just more or leas created more to ponder...
So what is sin to me?
Sin is the vehicle that transports me away from God. It increases the distance between where I am and the destination I seek.
choosing my innate, sinful desires, telling myself that they are "better", more "right" for me, or more "satisfying" to me than what God, holy and infinite, has set before me. I hate sin. I hate that I choose it over God. I am not worthy of His grace and mercy, but God ROCKS! I am alive only by His infinite worth!
Here's the one that Cor read during his sermon on April 27th, 2000:
“All week long I starve for what God forbids, even though I know it’s poison. I am afraid my needs won’t be met. Pray that I have the courage to get past this and return to the Lord. [My world] is a pit of temptation in which I sometimes dream of falling. These dreams haunt me. I am split between my desire to love God and my desire to throw myself into something that would break His heart. And I am to pretend like I don’t have this struggle. Yet even while I pretend I am not Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall, I flirt with the enemy - almost compulsively, just to keep the door to sin open in case I might otherwise miss out on something.”
These are SO great! I think if I were to boil it down to one word, I would define sin as:
IDOLOTRY
that is, worshiping something other than God to fill me in a way that pushes God out of where he belongs (in the King spot of my life) and places me or leisure or sex or vacations or rest or lust or any other thing as an idol in it's place.
When you were defining sin at the beginning of the message,I thought of a definition. Sin can be very addicting. One thing I struggled with before I got married was attention from guys. It's amazing how addicting it is to seek it and for a moment it feels good. But you keep going for it, and it gets bigger and bigger. What once was enough attention is now not enough.
SIN IS ADDICTING. (That would be my definition of sin)
But, now that I am following Christ, it no longer has authority over me.
Sin is breach of covenant with God. Disobedience.
The foundation of all Law is: love the Lord and love your neighbor. (Matthew 22:36-40) Breaking those two rules is the foundation of all sin. The Old Covenant added more specifics to help the Israelites understand what was required of them. Under the New Covenant, failure to be like Christ is sin.
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