Perhaps, one of the issues causing so many challenges in the Church and with our credibility before the culture is the issue of unrepented sin. Some of you are so averse to the subject you may not continue reading the following paragraphs.
Sin is not a popular subject. I am not talking about confronting people outside the Church. They belong to God. Only He can be the righteous and merciful judge of their lives. I am talking about those of us who profess to follow Christ and may have allowed the issue of sin to slip from our spiritual vocabulary. It has become acceptable in some houses of worship to shy away from the issue of personal sin for fear it might offend. Jesus had no problem confronting sin in love. Think of the woman caught in adultery and her accusers. Neither were spared from having their sin confronted. The truth about their sin was confronted as an act of love.
If you haven’t read Paul’s epistles in a while, you should. They are refreshingly honest and straightforward. He was not afraid to address sin in the Church because it was an act of love. Many of us have preached about our place in Christ, our rights, and our identity as believers. Those are important subjects to teach, but not while living in the illusion that we can continue to sin unchallenged thinking no consequence awaits us.
Paul wrote something in his letter to the Galatians that has unique imagery. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there” (Galatians 5:24). Another image also develops creating an uncomfortable contrast. When we choose to redefine sin or ignore it all together it is like we went to the place of our personal crucifixion and ripped the old person off the nails in a gory reversal of our freedom and then try to live a life of faith in that dead body. It doesn’t work.
Earlier in Galatians Paul wrote, “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So, I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless” (Galatians 2: 20-21).
When as believers we live and tolerate unrepented sin in our life and our place of fellowship thinking we will get a pass and can treat the grace of God as meaningless, we put ourselves, our families, and the integrity of our faith and its witness in place of unnecessary jeopardy.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on Garris Elkins
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
