The Surprising Idea of Sin
Jan 27th, 2009 by ljkim
Believing in the Christian view of Sin doesn’t make you more judgmental…it actually makes you LESS judgmental. Here’s why: Most people believe in good and bad people, you should accept the good people and reject the bad. But the Bible says that we’re all the “bad” people because we all Sin. In fact the Christian idea is that we’re hopelessly sinful, sinning even when we don’t mean to. So if you reject all the bad people eventually you’ll have to reject everyone…including yourself, because everyone, even the people you love most, have been infected to the core with the disease of Sin.
Now most people don’t believe this (that everyone has Sin), and I’m not trying to convince you of it here. But what I want you to see is that IF you were to believe it, and to the extent that you did believe it, it would make you less judgmental. You couldn’t condemn people, write them off, hate them because of their sin because you’d know you were in the same boat. Believing in one’s own sinfulness is one of the more difficult things to accept (before you accept it), but one of the most liberating things once you do… Because the moment you believe this, you become tranferred (in a sense) from your old world of self-righteousness (where everything good you got because you deserved it), to a world of grace and mercy (where you got infinitely better than you deserved).
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