What's the Big Deal About Sin?
As many of you know, I was slow to come to Christ. Though I was baptized as an infant and yet again at age 17, though I was raised in church and educated in Christian schools, though I was an openly professing Christian and attended church for the bulk of my adult life, though I went forward for altar call after altar call and earnestly prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer” countless times, and even though I could speak in tongues, it wasn’t until I was nearly 41 years old that I was granted the repentance that leads to life (Acts 11:18). That’s when everything began to change.
Prior to this, I’d had no category for false conversions. “Once saved, always saved” I was told. But I was never told, and the possibility never occurred to me, that I might not have been saved in the first place. After all, I never once denied that Christianity was true. I affirmed all the core doctrines. When I fell into lengthy periods of sinful living, I chalked it up to “backsliding” and eventually, when things got bad enough, I’d resolve to start “living like a Christian” again. If my conscience was troubled by an exceptionally grievous sin, I would pray to God for forgiveness and resolve never to do such a thing again. On the rare occasions when I actually questioned my salvation, I would be pointed back to the “Sinner’s Prayer(s)” I had prayed. (If you really meant it, you can trust that you are saved!) Or I was pointed back to my (2nd) baptism, or to the fact that I could speak in tongues, or even to the fact that I was a “better Christian” than So-and-So. Never mind the fact that these were the only so-called evidences of Christianity in my life.
But something was very wrong. By my late 30’s I was disappointed, discontent, and depressed. Finding no comfort at all in my so-called faith, I resorted to anti-depressants and therapy, neither of which provided lasting relief. I drifted from church and began to drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney, and swear like a sailor. After a few years of this, I began for the first time in my life to seriously consider that I might not really be a Christian at all. The old so-called evidences could no longer convince me otherwise. And having done all the things that I was told a person must do to become a Christian, it seemed to me that there was nothing left for me but to try for the umpteenth time to pull myself up by my bootstraps and start “living like a Christian.” But this time, I didn’t have it in me. I was lost and I finally knew it. But I was too tired of trying and too numbed by medication and alcohol to really care, until a personal tragedy for which I was partially to blame snapped me out of my stupor. On that day I realized I had never trusted God, because until that day, I’d never begun to understand the gravity of sin.
In the years that followed, I struggled to make sense of the decades that had turned out to be my so-called Christian life. Why did none of those heart-felt “Sinner’s Prayers” stick? How could I be sure I was really saved this time? How could I be sure I wouldn’t fall away as I had so many times before? Where had I gone wrong? How had I been so deceived? Was it purely self-deception, or was there something deficient in the teaching I had received? This was no morbid obsession with the past. These questions were a matter of life or death to me. With my eternal soul hanging in the balance, I was determined not to get it wrong again.
I listened to sermon after sermon. I read book after book. And eventually I began to search and study the Scriptures for myself, all the while evaluating the things I had believed and been taught prior to my conversion, weeding out falsehoods and making sure I was building on a sure foundation. Over time it became clear that self-deception had not been my only problem. The quasi-faith and pseudo-repentance that had characterized my so-called Christian life were made possible, in part, by gospel presentations that were, in my case, insufficient.
Though I could recite from memory that “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23), I never really understood why. I could never understand why Adam deserved to die for a single bite of a fruit. And I certainly could not accept that I, even though I’d committed some grievous sins, really deserved damnation. How, I secretly wondered, could God be so petty? Though I never asked it out loud, my biggest question was always this: “What’s the big deal about sin?”
That single question explains why I had to fall so deep into sin and for so long before I could even acknowledge that I deserved God’s judgment. And that single question represents what I now recognize as the gaping hole in the “faith” that failed me for all those years. That question exposes two intimately-related fatal weaknesses in my understanding of the gospel: 1) the nature of sin and, even more fundamental, 2) the character of God.
“Christians” are leaving the church in droves, many abandoning the faith entirely, just as I was on the path to doing. And it is my conviction that these twin failures in our gospel messaging share a big part of the blame. Many of these people are leaving behind a gospel they never understood in the first place. I am not saying, of course, that if we just get it right, everyone will be saved. Not at all. But if people are walking away, we need to be sure they are walking away with a full understanding of the good news that they are rejecting. So in my next few articles, I would like to spend some time filling in some gaps we might have in our understanding of the doctrine of sin and how it relates to the character of God.
You can read Part 2 here.
