Positive Faith and Sin Part II

Read yesterday’s post before reading this. It’ll help.

People tend to be afraid that talking about faith positively means you’re unwilling to face the “hard” parts of faith. To be honest- that makes me either eye roll or laugh depending on how generous I’m feeling (and I’m not usually feeling generous).

So let’s just go there.

What is sin?

Well, in the Bible anyway, it’s a few different things. 1. It’s a force that is active in the world that opposes God’s plan to bring creation totally in line with his values (compassion, patience, mercy, love). 2. This is kind of a continuation of 1, but, the force that opposes God’s plan that is somehow within each of us. 3. A specific action that does not line up with God’s plan. Let’s unpack each of these three a little further (but I’m not going to go into great detail).

There’s an impersonal component to sin because it’s something outside of ourselves that we all battle and this force can pull us away from our certain way of seeing and being in the world. In other words, sometimes we live “in sin” because we’ve been influenced by sin.

There’s a personal component of it as well. Pay careful attention to how I preface this next sentence. Without some guidance, help, support, affirmation, or love, we do not instinctively put God’s love on display in our lives. I believe this is, practically speaking (not so much theologically speaking), what it means to live in sin. It’s when we are unable to prioritize reflecting God’s love to the world around us. We are more than capable of doing it- but we need the love and support of others in order to get there (in addition to the love of God, naturally).

The third component of sin is something I’m not particularly interested in unpacking. The individual actions that we do flow out of something that happens in 1 or 2 and, as a general rule, people are not particularly confused about the specific for instances of when they do not reflect God’s love.

I tend to believe that focusing on creating a community that fosters love, support, affirmation, admiration, and more, will create the environment we need to better reflect God’s love. That needs to be our focus in order to take sin seriously.

I’ll say more tomorrow.