Sin

To a lot of us, the idea of sin can become quite old-fashioned and abstract. Sometimes, we avoid thinking about it all. When we do think about it, we can fall into either assuming that everything we do is sin, or that it’s only extreme actions that count. The truth is hidden somewhere among all of that.

What we call sin is simply anything that we could allow to negatively affect our relationships with God, with others, and with ourselves. It’s anything that we could allow to get in the way of what God wants for us. Whether it’s something that we think, something that we do, or something that we neglect to do, we can understand sin as anything that blocks the pipes between us and the Holy Spirit.

As Psalm 51:4 tells us, all of our sin is against God only. It becomes a problem, not because God has a list of rules and is desperate to punish us (that’s not who He is!), but because they get in the way of our connection to Him. He loves us and wants a relationship with us more than anything.

There is good news in that. If everything negative that we do counts only against God, He is the one who can clear the connection by forgiving us. Read Isaiah 6, particularly verse 7. It’s a great illustration of how ready God is to restore our relationship with us, and how completely He’ll do so. The minute that you turn to Him and tell Him that you want to live alongside Him, ‘your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged’ (NKJV).

No matter what ‘sin’ we have in our lives, God is ready to deal with it and, from there, will help us become more like Him every day.

2 Ki 6:1-7; Matt 14:22-33