Sin is lame. So often church folks eat up all this time talking about 'sin, sin, sin', which in my opinion could be much better spent talking about how awesome God is. But Sin is a hot topic, so let's talk about it. I'd like to talk about some truths that God has revealed to me concerning Sin that have really helped to boot it off my 'things that waste my time' list (right up there with having to wear shoes :) I think the biggest thing that keeps the topic of Sin coming up so much in people's lives is that a lot of us have no earthly clue what Sin actually is. It's sort of like the word "self-esteem", which we throw around all the time but don't really know what the heck we're talking about.
Sin is ultimately the name for how you live apart from God. It is not an action, it's a lifestyle, you could maybe even call it a life source (if you could call Sin 'life' at all). The reason we so often think of sin as certain actions is because that's what we see; even the Bible talks about how sin manifests itself in people's lives: bitterness, envy, the need for control, fear, anxiety, etc. But trying to get rid of sin by cleaning up someone's actions is like putting someone with a fever into a bathtub filled with ice. You may cover up a symptom of the problem, but the problem causing the symptom remains, and therefore you're not really fixing anything. Sinful actions are merely symptoms of the problem: a life that is apart from God. How can we fix it? Well, we can't. As fallen humans the only way possible for us to live is apart from God, and in that state we can go to church, get drunk every night, read the Bible, burn people's houses or build homes for orphans our whole life and it would all be sin, not because of what we do but because of what we are!
But here's the incredible part; what we couldn't do, God did for us. Through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross and His resurrection, God made available to us a new way of living our lives. Until then there was only one way of life available to us: SIN. But through Jesus we have the ability to live by His Spirit, and not be controlled by Sin anymore! So far perhaps, you have heard all this before, but it still all comes down to this: this is all easy to say, but we're still just talking theology here; how do you actually put this into practice? That's the real question, right? And that's what most of us struggle with, we simply don't understand how to CHOOSE between these two ways of living. We spend our days mulling over things that we said or did or thought previously and wonder if that was something that God put there or if we were actually sinning. All this kind of reasoning will do is give you a huge headache!
Instead, think of it this way: you can only live one way or the other at any given point in time. It's not a 50/50 thing, or a 25/75 thing. The Bible says that the lifestyle of SIN and the lifestyle of THE SPIRIT are antithetical; complete opposites; one cannot exist while the other is there. So that makes it a little simpler, right? You either are living by SIN, or living by the SPIRIT. But how do you actually CHOOSE between the two? Think about it. To live by SIN, you can do just about anything besides trust God with your life. So how do you live by the SPIRIT? Simply trust God with your life! Throughout your everyday, ordinary, going-to-work, eating-a-bag-lunch, waiting-in-traffic life, you can make the choice to trust God to express himself in and through you. That is living by the SPIRIT.
'But how do you know He's doing that,' you may ask? The way I figure it, if you're lifting up your heart to God in trust, the ball's in His court. And the coolest thing of all is that God is ALWAYS faithful! I can guarantee you that whenever you come to Him--no matter how infrequently--in trust and surrender, in that moment you have "flipped the switch" of your life source from SIN to the SPIRIT. No seminary knowledge needed, no works of service under your belt, just a simple choice to trust God with your everyday, ordinary life.
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