May 3, 2012
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Why preach sin?
There is a pretty disturbing trend in churches nowadays. Huge ones, too…huge and successful, as defined by many. This trend is to downplay sin, eliminating words like hell, condemnation, judgement, repentance, guilt, etc. This is quite dangerous.
Why? Because if our sin isn’t important, there is no need for a savior.
Let me put it another way: If we aren’t sinners, and just make bad choices, then Jesus did not need to die for our sins. If God sent His Son to die for our sin when he didn’t really need to…then God is a cruel jerk who killed His Son for no reason. Either sin is important enough for Jesus to die, or it’s not important at all.
I’m all for living a good life, having smooth marriages, good kids, a nice job and house and car…and good times. But lets be honest, if that’s what church is teaching, then leave Jesus out of it completely. He is too precious to be reduced to a provider of a good life.
Sin Kills. Jesus saves. Jesus died a literal death, and saved us from a literal hell. If there is a hell, don’t you want to hear about it? And avoid going there? So what are these pastors doing, who downplay sin? What are they gaining from this (probably money and power, but that’s a topic for another day)?
If you are a Christian, think with me for a minute. When was the last time your pastor taught from the Bible about sin and repentance, and how Jesus won our forgiveness on the cross? Do you hear that week after week, or do you hear things about having a good life, getting more money, being never sick or lonely, and having a good marriage or sex life? If you aren’t hearing Christ preached…Him crucified and resurrected, what is the point? Life change is not repentance. Being forgiven of your sins is not the same as living a good life.
“If your sin is small then your Savior will be small also. But if your sin is great, then your Savior must be great.” – Charles Spurgeon
Comments (14)
I think more and more I’m realizing we probably shouldn’t go to any church that doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable about a lot of things…
I have to say I love my church because our pastor is constantly challenging me with messages reminding me of why I needed to be saved. But he does it in love. It’s a fine line to walk. Can’t say I envy the job of a pastor.
@firetyger - What is the fine line?
@NightCometh - You can speak the truth to someone but not do it in love. That is the fine line. You know you’ve crossed the fine line when you leave the other person crushed in spirit. And I’m not talking about a broken spirit…sometimes the truth does break us but in a healthy way. A crushed spirit is something else entirely.
thank you for this. very thought-provoking.
Catholic priests generally give homilies accentuating the mercy of Christ. But our worship and spiritual practice place acknowledgement of our sins first.
The Mass begins by everyone asking Christ for mercy and then a reflection and/or vocal confession of our sins and a request that we all pray for each other.
But that only takes two minutes out of the entire hour of the Mass.
Also, we must receive the sacrament of Reconciliation (aka Confession, aka Penance) if we have committed a mortal sin. Otherwise we won’t be able to receive Holy Communion.
But even among Catholics the grave nature of sin and its importance has greatly diminished. Most people only go to Confession the required twice a year anymore.
Being old school, I go to Confession every chance I get even if it means saying, “Bless me father for I have sinned, it’s been 3 days since my last confession.”
I avoid some words simply because I think they’ve gotten lost in translation. “Sin” is a great example. It is, I understand, a term borrowed from archery, the idea of a “miss,” and that is the context and connotation it originally meant to have. Well, it has none of that now. The connotation of the word “sin,” for many unchurched, is Fred Phelps spewing hate on a street corner. The word has become synonymous with condemnation for many. And so, if I try to lovingly tell an unchurched person that they have sinned, or that they are in sin, they will think that I’m telling them that I hate them.
And so I reach for other tools in my lexical toolbox. “Bad choices” may not cut the mustard, but “Failures” is one that is close to the original meaning. I like “crimes against God.”
It’s the same thing with “repentance,” a term meaningless to the unchurched. “Turn away from what I’ve been doing” might be long-winded, but it translates the intent well.
I understand the point you were making, but I do think it is important to translate our key concepts out of Christianese.
The last time I heard my pastor preaching on sin, repentance, faith, and Jesus dying for my sin was Wednesday. The next time would be Sunday, but he will be out of town to attend a wedding. I expect he’ll talk about it again on Monday should he make it back in time. So grateful to be in a church where the Gospel is rightly proclaimed.
Are you reading The Proper Distinction of Law and Gospel that Chris Rosebrough published in January? If not, I would suggest it. You’ll have some disagreements with the author, as do I, but it has been a great read so far. I’ve learned a bit, and had to reconsider some things. The author is C.F.W. Walther, the founder of the LCMS Lutherans. (This is the book I tweeted about earlier that referred to blood letting.)
@OutOfTheAshes - I definitely agree on repentance, it has to be defined, your substitute works for it. As for sin, trespass might be a fair one, it is used in the Lord’s prayer in many translations. Though, even this might miss the mark for many. Moral failings might work, but I think it softens the blow.
Very inspiring! Thanks for your post. Although I’m a Christian and sometimes can’t catch what you mean here in your post, I truly agree with what you say “being forgiven of your sins is not the same as living a good life”. It’s meaningless and selfish to live so-called good life without thinking what we can do to help creating a better and peaceful place for everyone.
Amen to that!
One observation about the “name it, claim it” philosphy– it overlooks the petition “Your will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer.
If we were to judge our success on “the good life” and things here, — well, look at Job–for 1
Hi Amy, Many of the churches we attended were expositional preachers. By that I mean, the taught a book of the Bible verse by verse. They would cover many subjects including the ones you mentioned today.
Some preachers taught topically. I did not like those as much. However, my recollection is that they were true to the gospel.
The church we will probably attend is very true to the Gospel. I am disappointed at all of the psychology in the preaching, but he makes the Gospel clear.
Paul was not a single subject guy. My understanding with him is his devotion to Christ, willing to pay any price to share the Gospel, emphasized the death of Christ on the cross and His resurrection followed by holy living, sound doctrine, detecting false teachers (maybe Peter), and God’s provision. He also taught giving.
I am not a good example of a Christian, but I think my wife is.
frank
I’m going to try to understand where your coming from. I know I’m way late for this post, but I’ve been asking this question alot lately. I was raised catholic, recieved all my sacraments but marriage and death.
When religious authority preach hell fire and damnation, or put emphasis on how god killed his only son, it turns me off. I feel that they are guilt tripping me.
I didn’t choose to be a sinner by default. And i feel like there are better more applicable, or atleast more palletable, ways to bring people into your congregation.
No one has yet been able to explain to me in a way that makes sense why jesus had to die. I can’t fathom an all-powerful being whose hands are tied.
The logic goes like this – in the bronze age people believed a god was responsible for the things they didn’t understand, the weather, the sun and moon, the seasons etc, and they believed that this god was good and just for the same reason christians remove condemnations from their sermons – wishful thinking. It’s much more pleasant to imagine a god who loves us and wants what’s best for us than to imagine a vindictive jerk who wants us to suffer. But like modern theists they struggled with the obvious fact that many things in nature are bad for us – poisonous animals and plants, natural disasters like floods and drought, disease, etc. They didn’t understand these things and so they attributed them to god too (or later, the devil) but in order to maintain belief in a good god, it was necessary that it was good to send a flood to kill babies and their mothers and send diseases to kill children etc. So they came up with the concept of inherited sin, the idea that babies deserve to die because they inherited the sins of their ancestors. But now they had a problem – if we are inherently sinful and wicked from birth how do we avoid god’s wrath? To address the problem ritual sacrifices were performed, they mystically bound their sins to an animal and then killed the animal, thus removing their sin from the world and (theoretically) avoiding god’s wrath (results may vary).
Then around 2,000 years ago judaism was in a time of great upheaval and many didn’t want to follow outmoded rules like animal sacrifice (which wasted precious food). Around that time a man who was purported to perform various miracles and said to be the son of god (neither were uncommon claims back then, just as so-called “god men” and their alleged miracles are common in india to this day) was brought before the roman prefect by the local religious leadership and executed for blasphemy, and his followers went on to claim that they didn’t have to follow many of the old testament laws because their reformer was the messiah and he was sent from god as a sacrifice and this would make all other sacrifice unnecessary.
So you see in order to believe jesus had to die for their sins, you must believe in the logic of ritualistic animal sacrifice. And in order to believe in that you have to believe sins are passed on from our ancestors and babies and children sometimes deserve to die. And in order to believe that you have to believe things like viruses and bacteria are demons sent by god to punish the wicked, as the bible explicitly states, and that bad weather is god’s wrath.
The trouble is we understand weather and illness and all of that now, and it’s god nothing to do with god punishing people. So the logic upon which it appears to have been built was flawed thousands of years ago, we just didn’t know it.