This word, “sin” has me bothered. I grew up thinking that “sin” meant evil. That being sinful meant I was inherently a bad person. So the connotation of this word for me depicts someone I am not. I am NOT sinful. I am good! I love! I care for others!
And here I am as an adult, after years struggling with this word, I understand that the definition was bastardized by a collective of people in my life who used that word in harsh judgment. In ways to categorize and divide. But now, the truth is I understand we all sin. All of us. Every last one. This word “sin” really is our separation from God. As some may say (but I think this word goes too heavily in the opposite direction of minimizing sin) would be to say we are flawed. We are flawed because we inherently sin, but we are not inherently bad. This is a very important distinction because when we get it wrong, we tend to back away from a word that will help us to understand not only who we are, but how we are saved. And that being a “sinner” doesn’t make us bad, but we are certainly flawed. Yet sin is bad, so I need to work toward correcting my sin, but I am not bad when I am working at that correction. We may talk about people who are working on themselves, or who have done work, or such and there are those that don’t. The ones that seem to have no regard for their issues and “need to do work”, those are the problem people. The ones that don’t recognize their issues.
And so I will get into this thing called “sin’. Because sin doesn’t look bad-it looks alluring! And sin doesn’t necessarily mean those big things that we all know are wrong (stealing, murder, gossip, etc.) but more subtle ways that we sin—ways in which we give over the power of God to the power in our lives.
Remember, sin means our separation from God, so often we equate sin with evil. And while evil = sin, sin does NOT always = evil.
Sometimes our sin looks like putting our faith in other things—and it’s so easy to do when it seems reasonable, not sinful. Like when we put our faith in doctors to cure or heal or know “best.”
We are besieged in our country by disease and the medical community and its medications as a panacea to ease our pain, our mental anguish, our utter despair and our fear in the world. We give our children ibuprofen and acetaminophen from birth and think nothing of it. This thinking makes me question what has happened in our society that our babies need medications? And I also think about how we are creating a subtle and consistent indoctrination into the world of putting faith in the medical community. It’s been so long entrenched generationally that it has become the norm. The standard of continual medical intervention has been set. So much so that society believes it neglectful when you don’t continually intervene.
Is that what God intended? Because this standard that has been set has so subtly shifted our mindset of understanding our bodies and how our bodies are made (in the image of God Himself!) that we have put a faith in the medical community that is unwarranted. Remember, doctors are humans, too who also sin.
When we live in a society that has so subtly chipped away at the WHOLENESS of God, it is so hard to come to the FULLNESS of His intentions for us.
This is the second post in a series that I will be doing on what sin looks like, what consequences it has that we don’t think about and how to guard our hearts and actions.
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