What Ever Happened to Sin?

"Whatever happened to sin?" I wish you could hear me ask that question in the quiet of my mind. If you could, then you would understand that I am asking it like sin was an old friend who lived down the hall from me in college, someone that I would expect to bump into on FaceBook. I ask about it like it's someone that I used to spend time with and, because our paths went in different directions, we've simply lost touch.

I ask that question not because I'm too good to sin, I'm not. Much to my chagrin, I am as fully capable of falling today as I ever have been.

For me the question is far more communal than personal. I'm asking you, too! Have you heard about sin? Where did it go? When I was growing up I heard all kinds of sermons on it. I heard as much about sin as I did grace and love. Because I recognized the presence of sin I longed for the presence of grace and love.

Thinking through this, I decided to look at the last five years of my preaching calendar. Of the 250+ sermons I preached, surely I could find some that included "sin" in their titles. Guess what: The search yielded a series of sermons titled, "What's Missing?" Can you believe that? I'll tell you what's missing ....

Sin is missing from our collective conversations. It is politically incorrect and and therefore taboo. If we talk about sin then we are too negative and too narrow. To point out sin is judgmental and arrogant and so we avoid it like the plague. The only problem is that sin is the problem, and it needs to be identified.

Sin is not really missing, it's just hidden in plain sight. Sin is ...

• killing babies and calling it choice
• blowing up abortion clinics and calling it justice
• racking up credit card debt and calling it priceless
• living together before marriage and calling it cheaper
• looking out for No. 1 and calling it the American dream
• having an affair and calling it deserved
• eating too much and calling it a celebration
• talking bad about people and calling it a prayer request
• avoiding home and calling it providing for the family
• neglecting worship and calling it time to ourselves

In his book, Not the Way it is Supposed to Be, Neal Plantinga writes, "Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it -- both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. Sin is never normal. Sin is a disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and then resists the vital human relation to God."

Whether we talk about it or not, the evidence of sin is all around us. It is stealing, killing, and destroying life as it was divinely designed. Things are not the way they are supposed to be. The irony is that, instead of blaming men and their sin for the problems and suffering we experience, the world we live in blames the God we believe in. The end result is that because of sin, God and sin have become figments of the imagination.

Understand, I am in no way suggesting that we pick up our rocks of righteousness and begin stoning our neighbors. I don't think we need to return to the days of hell-fire and brimstone preaching. I'm certainly not asking for a revival of judgmental sin-speak that alienates the church from the culture we are called to reach.

What I am asking for is a reduction of sin in the church. Wouldn't it be cool if we had fewer sin addicts? Wouldn't God's kingdom come and his will be done more if we sinned less? Like they say in AA: to solve a problem you have to admit you have one. Can we admit we have a problem?

If we are going to talk about sin, calling it what it is, let's talk about it in-house. Let's get the church that enjoys the forgiveness of sin to begin living victoriously over sin. Then we will see that the compelling story of positive life-change inside the church will lead to transformation outside the church.