How Bad Is Sin….Really?

Each day I read “My Utmost for His Highest”, a daily devotional by a man named Oswald Chambers.  Chambers doesn’t write for the “faint of heart”.  He pretty much tells it like it is and doesn’t really care if you like it or not.  That was the way he preached and that was the way that he wrote.  If you are looking for a daily devotional, I highly recommend it.  You can find it at utmost.org.  Here is the beginning of today’s devotional:

“Sin is a fundamental relationship— it is not wrong doing, but wrong being— it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins— the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.”

I was struck again by the first sentence….sin is not wrong doing but wrong being.  Yet, so much of what we often talk about is the “doing” part of sin, not the “being” part of sin.  The reason that people think they can get to heaven by being a good person is because they are focusing on the “doing” part of sin and in their own estimation, are not doing all that badly.  But when we properly understand sin as a “being”, not a “doing”, we’ve got a big problem.  What can change the “being” part of who we are?  You can’t change this by effort or action.  A skunk can’t become a cat or a dog, simply by not spraying very much.  A skunk is a skunk is a skunk.  Unless the skunk was miraculously changed into something else, it will always be a skunk, even if it a sweet smelling skunk.

We are all sinners without Jesus Christ.  Some may be “cleaner” sinners than others but the problem is with our being and not our doing.  Only Jesus Christ can transform us from a child of the world to a child of God.  Let’s relish that today

Have a “no longer sin-being” day!