Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

I've been thinking about sin lately. By the way, I didn't say I've been thinking about sinning lately. That's different :) I've tried coming up with meaningful redefinitions in past years because the word "sin" is so misunderstood. Here are a few of my definitions:

Sin is meeting a legitimate need in an illegitimate way.

Sin is a waste of energy. It's the anti-thesis of stewardship. You waste your time and energy and imagination on things that are ungodly. And then you waste more emotional energy on guilt and anxiety.

I've come up with mental images over the years. I think sin is the anti-thesis of vision. Sin is like a leak in the bottom of the boat. Instead of using your energy to row your boat toward your destination you end up bailing water because there are leaks in the bottom of the boat.

The Greek word for sin, hamartia, originally referred to the bulls-eye of a target. Sin is missing the mark. In other words, no one hits the bulls-eye everytime!

I think sin is the law of entropy. It is moving toward disorder in our lives. Holiness means wholeness. If you want to read more about this idea, you can read my evotional on the second law of thermodynamics in The Physics of Faith series.

I think the image I got last Sunday at our club is one of the most personally poignant for me because I felt like the Holy Spirit gave me a picture. Sin are the burial cloths that mumify us. I think the story of Lazarus is a microcosm. The enemy of our souls wants to wrap us in burial clothes by getting us to sin. Jesus calls us out of the tomb and he unwraps us via confession and forgiveness.

I think sin dehumanizes us. It makes us less human. Think about it in terms of sexual sin. Sin outside the context of a marriage relationship is physical pleasure without sacred covenant (spiritual commitment). If lust runs it's course then you express yourself sexually toward everything that moves and breathes. Is anything more animalistic?

Sin is saying, "Thanks but no thanks." It is trying to make it without any help from your Manufacturer.

Sin is disconnection. It losing connection or living off-line.

Here is my latest thought. I'm been thinking about the essence of sin. I think it's pride. Instead of worshipping God it's wanting to be worshipped. I think all of us have that tendency. And when you're a baby the world revolves around you. I know some people who still act like babies! We all need a Copernican revolution. We need to realize that the sun doesn't revolve us. To put it in spiritual terms, the essence of pride is wanting everyone and everything to revolve itself around you. But the planets only allign when we revolve our lives around God. That is when things come into orbit. So here's the deal. Sin is wanting everyone to worship you. Righteousness is wanting everyone to worship God. The problem with that is this: your world gets smaller and smaller and smaller. It's like being in the trash compactor in The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi (sorry, can't remember which one). Your world closes in on you. Life gets smaller and smaller and smaller until all that's left is little tiny you. One other problem with worshipping yourself. If you're anything like me, you run out of stuff to worship real fast. But here's the flipside. When you worship God your world gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it never stops! I can't even think of a pictorial for this. I guess we'll have to wait till we open our eyes and see heaven for the first time! What a landscape and cityscape that will be. In that sense, maybe sin is missing the forest for the trees. C.S. Lewis said that God “finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.” He said, “We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.”

Lewis also said, “Any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even plucking out his right eye) was precisely nothing: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation.” Sin is giving up everything for nothing. Jim Elliott said it best: "He is no fool who loses what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Sin is gaining what you cannot keep. All is lost.

All of that to say this: stop sinning.