There are sixteen articles of faith within the manual for the Church of the Nazarene. These articles spell out our core doctrines and foundational understandings of God, Scripture, the human condition, and how God relates to us. Ideally, I’d like to take sixteen weeks and go through each individually, but in some cases, the doctrine of a given topic is spanned across multiple articles. For instance, you cannot talk about the trinity without also talking about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Today we take a look at the problem of sin. I’m not going to pretend that I’m perfect. Scripture clearly states that everyone has sinned (Romans 3:23). I remember one time in particular. I was in elementary school. I was always one of the good kids. I was polite to the teacher; I turned my work in on time; and I when everyone else was being loud and crazy, I sat quietly at my desk. I was the goody two shoes in class. I never lied, never cheated, and never stole. For this reason, the teachers trusted me.
It happened one day that the whole class was feeling extra rowdy. I got caught up talking and chatting with my friends during class, but when the teacher called for us all to be quiet, I did. Some of my friends near me, however, continued to talk. She had a group of girls on the other side of her that were particularly chatty, and she got caught up in what they were talking about. The teacher called all three of them out and was getting ready to keep them in from recess. My friend sitting next to me objected saying that she hadn’t been talking, even though she most definitely had, and the teacher, second guessing what she had seen, looked to me. She asked me if my friend had been talking, and in that moment I decided the best thing for me to do was to lie.
Being the honest kid that I was, the teacher believed me without question. I don’t know why I did it, but to this day that moment still follows me. My friend was grateful that I’d lied for her, but I knew that what I had done was wrong. I also knew that I couldn’t confess this to the teacher without destroying my reputation as a kid that didn’t lie.
It may seem like a small thing, but this act of lying, no matter how big or how small, is sin. Each of us has our own story. Each of us has had an experience like this. Each of us has sinned at one point or another. Maybe you took something that didn’t belong to you. Maybe you’ve had impure thoughts about another person. No matter what it is, each of us, at one time or another, have sinned.
This idea of sin is talked about and reflected upon throughout the entirety of scripture. As we flip through the pages we can find two distinct types of sin. The first we are all familiar with. That is personal sin. When I lied to my teacher, that was personal sin. John Wesley described it as, “a willful transgression against a known law of God.” When we know what we should do and choose against it anyway, that is what Wesley would classify as sin.
The argument then inevitably comes around and people begin to ask, “If someone has never read the Bible or has never been told that lying or stealing is wrong, can they sin?” The short answer is yes. Even before I began attending church, I knew without a doubt that lying was wrong. I knew that it was wrong to take things that didn’t belong to me. When primitive, cannibalistic tribes are found in the remote parts of the Amazon Forest, they know that it is wrong to kill people. The thing is, they just don’t believe the people they’re eating are real people. Each of us inherently knows right and wrong. We may choose to justify it or make excuses, but deep down we know right from wrong.
God explains this to us in Hebrews 10:16, “This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.” Each of us knows right from wrong because God has made it known to us. When we take something that doesn’t belong to us, that’s a sin, a willful transgression against a known law of God. If you accidentally take someone’s purse or wallet, maybe it looks just like yours, that’s not a sin. However, if upon realizing your mistake you still choose to keep it, that now becomes a sin. Accidents happen, but when I lied to my teacher, I knew that what I was doing was wrong. Even if it happened in the spur of the moment, I willingly chose to not go back to my teacher and confess.
There is also a second type of sin, which we call original sin, inherited sin, or the sinful nature. I’m not going to go into too much detail. We’ll cover this more in-depth in a couple of weeks, but original sin, as we read in scripture, is the sin that we’ve inherited from the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. In the garden, Adam and Eve freely conversed with God and had a relationship with him. However, when they chose to disobey him, that relationship was broken. No longer did they seek to please God and live in harmony with each other. Instead, they sought after their own personal gain. This broken relationship and selfish attitude is a key factor in personal sin. I know in my heart that it’s wrong to lie to my teacher, but I do it anyway because it benefits me. Again, we’ll talk more about this in a couple of weeks.
So, what seems to be the problem? Each of us has selfish motivations to seek out our own best interest at the expense of God’s laws and our fellow humans. Each of us has willfully done things in our lives that go against the known law of God. Each of us has sinned. You may not think this is a problem until you realize, as Paul wrote to the church in Rome, that “the wages of sin is death.” Because of our rebelliousness, because of our disdain for the laws of God, we have chosen to separate ourselves from him.
This may seem like a pretty harsh punishment. All I did was lie to my teacher. You’re telling me that the price for lying to my teacher is death? The problem with sin is that it goes deeper than the physical or mental act. God clearly spelled out to Adam that if he ate of the tree that he would surely die (Genesis 2:17). He wasn’t passing sentence on them. He didn’t set an extreme punishment in hopes that we would do the right thing.
God is righteous and just. It’s a part of his nature. It’s who he is. He is the source of all good and all life. Nothing good comes except by God. Without God’s hand, there would be nothing. When we choose to sin, we are deviating from that. We are choosing to separate ourselves from God, the righteous source of all good things and the source of life.
Each of us has sinned of our own free will. Just like Adam and Eve, we’ve decided that our way is better, and because God is just, he cannot simply turn a blind eye when we break the law. This is the sin problem. We have separated ourselves from the only source of good and the only source of life. The price for our disobedience, our sin, is death. This is what it means to serve a just God. Justice will be done.
However, God is not only just. He is also love. God is fully aware of our condition, and while justice must be served, his desire is that none shall perish. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” When Adam and Eve first disobeyed in the garden, God knew that the price to be paid was death, and even back then he didn’t like it. At that moment God set a plan in motion to bring mankind back to himself. Mankind was not righteous and was not holy, but God loved us anyway. He wants to be reunited with us and to have a relationship with us.
Justice demanded that the price is paid, so God took it upon himself to pay the price. God came to earth as flesh and blood. He lived among us and offered his own life to pay the price for our sins. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit.” (1 Peter 3:18). By this act Christ has paid the price. He has made full atonement for the sins of mankind and has enabled us to have a relationship with him once again.
Since that time God the Holy Spirit has been moving in the hearts of men and women to show them his love. He has been putting things in place, trying to get your attention so that you might understand what he’s done for you and choose to have a relationship with him. We call this prevenient grace. God is at work in the hearts and lives of men and women drawing them to him. He won’t force anyone into a relationship with him, but he will bring people into our lives; he will weigh upon us the gravity of our sin problem; and he will give us every opportunity to accept the life that he is offering.
Many of us have come to that point in our lives. Through God’s prevenient grace we came to realize that, while we thought we were good people, we’ve sinned, and that sin separates us from God. We didn’t want to continue in our sin and believed God when he said we could be made new. It was at that moment that we repented of our sins. This doesn’t mean that we just felt sorry for what we’d done. We made a conscious decision that we didn’t want to be like that anymore. We made a choice that we wanted to follow God and turn away from the sinful life we’d been living.
At that moment, when we made that decision, when we asked Christ to forgive our sins, he did it. In that moment Jesus’ sacrifice wiped away all the sin and bad things we’d done in our lives. We were justified. Jesus took all of those personal sins away, and it was just as if you’d never sinned.
Through this, we become a new person. Paul writes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old is gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). A regenerative process has begun in which we are no longer our old selves. Old habits may not disappear instantly, but we no longer look at them the same. Our heart begins to desire the things of God, goodness, justice, and righteousness.
At the same time that we were justified, God also adopts us. The gospel of John states, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” (John 1:12) Not only does God forgive us, not only does he justify us, he adopts us into his own family. He makes us sons and daughters of the Kingdom of Heaven. This means that we are no longer lowly peasants, but we are heirs to King of Kings, the God of all creation. We aren’t strangers but a part of his family.
While many of us have come to that point, we’ve been justified and adopted into the family of God, the truth is that not everyone has done that. God’s prevenient grace is still working on some people, convicting them of their sin and letting them know that he has taken care of their sin problem. If that is you, if God has been speaking to you but you haven’t accepted his sacrifice and atonement for your sins, I want to give you the opportunity.
It doesn’t take any fancy words. It doesn’t take a special prayer from the pastor. All it takes is a repentant heart and a desire for God. I remember when I first came to the realization of who I was and what God was offering. The pastor gave an altar call, and I walked down to the front of the church and knelt at the altar. The pastor came down, prayed with me, and I became a child of God. I want to give you the same opportunity. If God has been speaking to your heart, I encourage you, respond to him. If you have any questions or would like to have a discussion, I’m available to talk.