Gospel 2: Sin

The bad news

Most people think they are generally quite good, moral people. Maybe not perfect, but who is? And compared with other people we know, that might be true. But comparing ourselves to other people is really not the important thing. It makes more sense to worry about how we measure up to God's standard.

Most people have heard of the ten commandments, so trying to keep those rules would surely be a good way to keep God happy, right? Rules like 'do not commit murder' and 'do not commit adultery', they sound achievable. Murder is an obvious bad one, and the vast majority of people haven't done it. But Jesus said "anyone who says 'you fool' will be in danger of hell." Adultery is more common than murder, but again most people haven't done it. And it's a fairly easy one to avoid at least. Unfortunately no, it's not. Jesus said "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." So it seems that God's standards are incredibly high, higher than anyone could ever hope to reach.

We are all on the wrong side of God. Falling short of God's standard is called 'sin'. This sin can either be doing something we shouldn't, like stealing, or not doing something we should, like not putting God first in our lives. And at the root of all sin is pride. We want to be in control. We'd rather live our own way than God's way. It shows that we don't trust him, or value him as much as we should. It's quite an insult to God who created us, and gave us everything we have. We all know that crime should be punished, because if it isn't, justice isn't done. So it would be unjust for God to ignore sin. He hates it, it offends him, and he has to get rid of it. If we sin, we're stained by it and we rule ourselves out of God's presence.

So what does that mean for us? Do we need to do as much good as we can, like in other religions, and hope it outweighs the bad? Unfortunately for us, because everything we have is given to us from God, we owe him perfection in every area of our lives. Actions, motives, everything. All the time! So, if you’ve ever done the teeniest thing wrong, even if it's something as small as being rude to your parents, you cant make up for it, ever! You already owe him every good thing you could ever do, so the good you do now doesn't make up for the bad you did before. We are all totally stuffed! It would be like trying to repay a man you owe money to, by taking money from his bank account and trying to give it back to him. It's just not going to work.

The good news

If God chose to come to Earth as a man and get involved with us humans, in the form of Jesus Christ, after we've all offended him so much and built up a massive debt of sin that we can't pay off, we really need to know what he was up to. The fact that he came to Earth and died is stunning. It's just seems weird, why didn't he come and start blowing people up? If I was God, I would have! Amazingly, Jesus chose to die. It wasn't forced on him, it was his plan all along. The victory Jesus came to achieve wouldn't be earned by taking control of the world by force, but by suffering and dying. He came to free us from the thing that holds us captive: Sin.

God knows we are totally lost without his help. Jesus lived a perfect life, so he had no debt of his own. He was the only perfect man to ever live, and he took the punishment for all our sin, so our debt can be cancelled. And not only does he offer to free us from sin, but he also gives us his righteousness. That means he shares with us his right, the right of a son, to come into God's presence. And on top of that, he transforms our lives. Jesus talked about us being born again, which means that there is a part of us which was dead, our spirit, which he brings to life. And with the new life come new passions and desires. As we increasingly see how amazing God is, we increasingly see sin for the disgusting thing it is. It won't disappear completely, you still have to fight it, but you can be sure that when you die, you'll be with God, and sin will be gone for ever. Then you'll be able to enjoy all the benefits of your new life, in ways that you never imagined. There wont be any more sickness, pain or death, no more sadness, no injustice, no fear. There'll be a whole universe to explore for ever. And for ever we’ll have God as our father and our friend.

How do you get it?

If someone is spiritually dead, like the bible says, how can they decide to become spiritually alive? Dead people don’t choose to come to life. The good news is that if you've decided that you want to accept Jesus’ offer of salvation, God has already chosen you! In fact the bible says he chose you before he made the world.

He brings us to life and then our natural response is to realise how desirable the gift is which he's offering us, and to want it. It's not that he forces us to take it, it's more like a man who's dying of thirst being offered a drink. There's no possibility that such a good thing would ever be refused!

So how do you actually receive this amazing, undeserved gift of salvation? Well, the first thing to do is to repent. It's not just being sorry, to repent means to change your mind, to stop going in one direction, to turn around and start going the other way. That means we turn away from the sin and pride that put us in so much trouble in the first place. We need to keep watch for it and run the other way every time we see it coming. We know that sin, as in 'doing wrong things', is the big problem that we want to escape from, so to turn away from that makes sense. But why is pride such a big deal? It never seemed like it was really that bad. Not as bad as some of the other sins, surely?

It’s natural for us to want the best for ourselves, to want to be happy. Our lives are full of choices we make in the attempt to be as happy as possible. We put ourselves firmly at the centre of our lives, the pivot around which the whole universe revolves. Unfortunately, every other person we meet has the same idea, everyone in conflict about who the most important person in the world is. It affects all our relationships, we even love other people with one eye on how it benefits us, or how it makes us look. The thing is, none of us is the most important person. God is. For us to live with ourselves at the centre is to dishonour God. This is exactly what got us into trouble in the first place! To gain salvation, we need to remove ourselves from the centre of our lives and put God there instead. This is humility, the opposite of pride. No one said that Christianity is easy, and this might be the hardest thing. The task is to trust that his way is better than our way.

We need to believe that Jesus, the son of God, died for us to take our punishment, and that his death was effective in paying our debt. And we need believe that he rose from the dead, so that we can share in his life. We're grafted into him, like shoots grafted into a plant, and it's by being 'in him' that we gain all the benefits of children of God.

So the Christian life begins by having faith in God, and we continue living by faith until we die, thanking him for all the good things he gives, trusting him for strength through all the difficulties and pains of life, and believing that however hard it might be, his plan is the best one because it's the only one that leads to eternal life.

But just one more thing, to help you practice that all important humility. Not only does God give you the gift of salvation, but even the faith by which you receive it is a gift from God. If he hadn’t brought you to life first, you would still be as dead as a doornail, totally unable to have faith in him. One more thing to thank him for!