Minimizing Sin

It's easy to minimize sin, trying to convince ourselves and others (and unfortunately, often successfully, despite whatever cognitive dissonance) that sin is not really that bad.

"It's just once", "I'm not really hurting anybody", "Everybody does this", "Nobody has to know", "It's not a big deal", so on and so forth...

I think as Christians, we know it's not right to minimize sin. I think we know that everything we do and think and say is not just "to ourselves and won't harm anyone", but rather a capital (literally) offense against the most supreme God, who knows all our inner thoughts and motives and has the ultimate right and authority to judge.

As if that's no big deal.

We also know that our own sin will affect others - whether it is to turn someone else away from Christ because of our actions, to directly harm someone else even if we didn't realize it, basically to damage the relationship between us and others or others and God.

As if that's no big deal.

People are fickle though - we often sway too far to one side or to the other. Either sin is no big deal or sin is so debilitatingly great that we can't function. So to the other extreme then - is it possible to maximize/make too great a deal of sin?

I don't know if this is the right answer... But I don't think so. Sin is sin is sin, and no sin is so small that it doesn't grieve God. I think that part of what it means to really grow in Christ is to understand the weight and depth and despicableness and destructiveness and horror of sin, no matter what it looks like.

I think there is no problem with "maximizing" sin, because of Who it is ultimately against. It is maximum. But instead, the problem on this side is that we minimize the power of God. We think our sin is too great for God to bear, we think that His grace is not sufficient, that His sacrifice does not suffice, that His Words do not heal and His power does not overcome.

This can lead to despair and bitterness, and to giving up - which consequently, funny enough (haha, not), can lead to the complete other side of the pendulum. "It's too hard to deal with this", so therefore, sin is not that bad after all. Isn't it funny how cognitive dissonance works?

Oh, how completely hopeless and futile our ways are when we're left to our own devices.. it brings to mind the passage in Romans 1, where God gives up the people to their own ways because though they knew Him, they did not glorify or give thanks to Him.

Sometimes I don't understand myself

Actually, make that a lot of the time..

Isn't it wonderful that we have a God who knows the depths of our hearts? Who sees everything, gross and disgusting and all, the things we may not yet see or understand or admit, yet still loves us so?

To be fully known and fully loved is something that I think every heart seeks but I also think so few really understand or get to experience. Maybe that is just the cynical part of me? God doesn't wish that any should perish [a], yet so often even we who have been bought with a price live as though we were not. Who can say that their heart is pure? [c]

I think I understand more and more Paul's laments of what I now see as utter despair in Romans 7. He cries out with such desperation, "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Can you hear the sorrow in his voice?

Maybe we need to be in such a place of desperation before we can understand the depth of what he says next. The Gospel, without an understanding of sin, is still the Gospel, in all the glory and majesty and awesomeness that it is. But who can accept it and its weight without that understanding of sin? And even as Christians, no matter how long a Christian, if we do not continually come to a place of this recognition, I think our faith can then teeter into the realms of self dependency, ungratefulness, salvation by works, and a whole other host of stuff..

Lord, please keep us at your feet, always, according to your mercy...