We Are Not Okay



I’ve been thinking about how we (humanity) have a strange way of comparing ourselves with others. I know we do this to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. We can always find someone fatter, dumber, poorer, and the list can go on. I think that’s why so many people like to compare their sinfulness with others. They think, “I’m not as bad as Joe Blow, so I’m okay.” That is so far from the truth.

There are no degrees of sin. Sin is sin. Homosexuality is not worse then gossiping; they are equally evil in the eyes of God. It goes back to where Jesus spoke regarding the person with the 2x4 coming out of their eye trying to tell the other person to get the speck out of theirs. God is the ultimate judge where sin comes in. He says in the book of Romans that everyone (all of humanity) has committed sins and because of our sinful acts, we are fallen short of His glory. God also says in the book of Romans that the wages or earnings of sin is death (both physical and spiritual).

The New Testament uses 5 main Greek words for sin, which together portray its various aspects, both passive and active. In each case either a standard is failed to be reached or a line deliberately crossed. It is assumed throughout scripture that the law was established by God. It is, in fact, His moral law, which expresses his righteous character. Sin is in itself self-centeredness.

In the book “Whatever Became of Sin,” Karl Menninger (a psychiatrist) shares his thoughts on how society has removed the word sin from our vocabulary. In describing the indefinite feeling of western society, its general mood of gloom and doom, Karl Menninger adds that “one misses any mention of ‘sin.’” Enquiring into the cases of sin’s disappearance, Menninger notes first that “many former sins have become crimes, “ so that responsibility for dealing with them has passed from church to state, from priest to policeman, while others have dissipated into sicknesses, or at least into symptoms of sickness, so that in their cases punishment has been replaced by treatment. A third convenient device called “collective irresponsibility” has enabled us to transfer the blame for some of our deviant behavior from ourselves as individuals to society as a whole or to one of its many groupings.”

You can see how our society has removed the seriousness of sin out of our thoughts. We think that what I do in my house or mind is nowhere near as bad as my co-worker, neighbor, family member, etc. I’m okay. It’s not until we are shown how bad we are in our sins that change can happen, but we cannot change ourselves.

Religion is man’s attempt to work on making ourselves better. Jesus told the religious leaders of His day that they were white washed tombs; looking pretty from the outside but were full of death and decay. It is God that can change us. God paid for the sins of humanity in the form of Jesus Christ; the gift of God is eternal life through the washing of our sin in Jesus’ blood. Once we accept this gift from God, we are forever changed.

Christianity is not a religion; true Christianity is a relationship with God through the gift of Jesus Christ, and the drawing of the Holy Spirit.