Sin is a word that sums up a problem with the human race in
our relation to God. Many think that
stealing, murder, lying is sin and in a way that is right. However to understand why we do these things
against God we need to find out what is going on inside.
The Bible tells us our hearts are sinful. We were born with this condition and before
we act upon it, it is part and parcel of our being. We were born with this condition and no
amount of doing good things will get to the root problem. At our core we are in rebellion against
God. This means we will take no regard
for our Creator, his point of view, as we live our lives. We can get involved with projects that do
good things but the core of our being makes this about us, our agenda, our
purposes. What is going on in our hearts, our motives,
passions, desires is the issue here. We
can fool the world that we are good and never really upset anyone. However this just means we are good at
covering the fact that we are doing it because it serves us.
The heart is cunning and can deceive us. It will lie to us and make us believe things
that are simply not true. So what do we
do? We are in a real mess if we cannot even trust our inner motives! But we do have an answer. God has given us a measuring device so we can
measure what is issuing from our core being.
This device is the Bible. The
Bible describes for us what others did in the past and how they were deceived
by their own hearts. We can view the
problem in others and apply the same cure.
Their cure was repentance before God .
A Christian is someone who has recognised their own heart deception and
repented before God. They recognise that
Jesus came to be the cure for sin. It
had to be judged so he stood in our place and God judged him instead. A Christian will never be judged for their
sin!
So was this a ‘sin-ectomy’? Are we free from this inner
malfunction? The answer is no! What Jesus did was saved us from the penalty
of sin on the cross. The ongoing work is to save us from the power of sin. This
is a co-operation with the Lord to live in faith and repentance. It’s like we’ve signed the contract…now live
up to it! How we stay faithful to this
task will be how the Lord will apportion roles and functions in the coming
Kingdom. The final part of salvation is
glorification where we are freed from the very presence of sin. We get new glorified bodies when the Lord
returns. Our flesh is transformed and
never again will sin be a problem.
Come Lord Jesus. Set
us free from this dungeon.
Gary Ward
Scriptural references for this blog:
The Book of Romans
The Gospels
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