One of the things that a lot of people ask is, “Is this a sin?  Can I do this?  What about this, will it send me to Hell if I do that?”    To most people, a sin is just something that you do that God doesn’t like, is listed as wrong in the Bible, or something grandma said was a sin.  Actually, sin is not a collection of things you are not supposed to do.  In reality, there is only one thing that is at the heart of all the things that we might consider as a sin.

        To understand this, I will use an illustration.   If you were able to collect all the things that we consider a sin and throw them into a big cooking kittle, light a fire under the kittle, and cook these things until there is just a pure residue, that residue would be pure sin.   What is that pure sin?  It is disobedience to God.

        When we understand that sin is the disobedience of God, then that understanding should open up for us a new perspective or view of sin.   That new knowledge declares that, “Sin is not only out in the world, it is also often in the church.”   Romans 3:23 declares that, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  Why is this so?

        It is true because, until we die and go to be with our Lord, we are still saddled with our old human nature.  Even the best of us need to repent daily and keep the way clear for us to the throne. These are the sins that come from being more religious than being like Christ.

        Many of these religious sins have to do with motives or why we do what we do.  Why do we come to church?  Why do we do some of the things that we do in church?  Why do we worship like we do?  Do we come to church out of an obligation to spend time in church each Sunday?  Do we give and pay our tithes because it is our duty because God commands the paying of tithes.  Do we support missions because the pastor asks us to so that the church can win an award?  Even the minister in the pulpit can deliver a perfectly good sermon and still sin in the delivering of that message.  Sometimes a preacher can use a sermon to target a person or persons for ungodly reasons.  In many cases a preacher is not so much interested in how the congregation receives the truth from God in the messages.  The preacher is more concerned with how the congregation view their delivery of the message.  Somewhere along the line we have taught our ministers that is more important how we preach that what we preach.   Often a church will choose a pastor on the basis of how they preach rather than trying the Spirit to see that person is a true shepherd.  Most often this leads to disaster.

Understanding why we do what we do is the key to the door that leads to a fulfilling life in Christ.   It opens the way to knowing that we need to repent.  It opened the way to a greater understanding for me of what a life in Christ is supposed to be.   I had to ask myself this question.   Do I do what I do because I love God with all my heart and all my soul?  Is God number one in my life?  Is everything I do have a connection with a desire to see souls won for the Lord?  Can I look at all the things I do and discard them if I have to?  Can I bring everything under the Blood of Jesus?  When we can answer yes to these questions and are sold out to Jesus, most of the sins that we commit are sins of omission.  These sins come from not doing as much as we could do.  It is here that I fail miserably and must repent and ask God to forgive me of all things.  If I do that with the faith of a child, then I am free knowing that there are no sins in my life.  But that doesn’t keep them from accumulating again.

Now that we know that sin is disobedience to God and that it is everywhere, we can talk about evil.   My mother had a favorite saying, “Don’t do that!  It’s wicked!”  She used it once to keep me from playing with the telephone while she was in the hospital.  Evil of course is the opposite of good.   Paul writes in Romans.  “There is none good, no not one.”   A famous author once wrote something like, “No matter how civilized man becomes, all you have to do to find the savage is to scratch his skin.”    There are many evils in the world.  The lie, that came with the rebellion of Satan,  is one of the most damaging.  The abuse of the weak by the powerful is also a great evil.  Christ was made angry because of this evil.  But the worst evil by far is found in Hebrews 3:12, “Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God.”   The greatest evil is the rejecting of Jesus Christ as our savior.  This is the sin that will cause many of our loved ones to stand before that terrible Seat of Judgment and hear their creator say, “Depart from me.  I never knew you.”

I would like to make this statement: “All sin, beginning with the original sin of Satan, is the result of breaking of the greatest commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other god before me’”.  Every sin whether it is in the world or in the church, comes from not putting God first in our lives.  When God is not number one, we are open to the lies of Satan which are usually the reasons we disobey God.

God bless.