Alive: Grow in Your Relationship With Jesusናሙና

I have my mother’s eyes and my father’s distinct nose. I also inherited my dad’s love of books and, shockingly, all of my mom’s parenting phrases that I swore I’d never use, like “make good choices” and “always take the high road.”

I have both inherited traits and learned traits; those I was born with and those I have actively adopted into my own behavior, for better or worse. You could say I inherited some and enacted others, choosing to practice them.

So much of our lives are determined by what we have inherited from our families, whether we can recognize these things or not. Unfortunately, “the Carlisle nose” isn’t the only thing I inherited from my father. Passed down from generation to generation, reaching all the way back to the Garden of Eden, I have inherited sinfulness—and so have you.

After God created Adam and Eve, He gave them one rule: don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That’s it. Everything else was fair game. However, if they did eat from it, the consequence would be certain death. (Go back and read Genesis 2:15-17 for this context.) However, the serpent assured Eve that was not the case, that God was just holding back a good thing from her, and the fruit was actually good for her because it would make her more like God!

Eve was enticed by the serpent’s temptation, and her trust in God wavered with catastrophic results. In a single moment, Adam and Eve’s rebellion changed everything. While their bodies didn’t immediately die, their close relationship with God did, and their physical death became an imminent reality. All the joyous life with God they had experienced was overtaken by shame. Sin entered the world, breaking God’s Perfect Creation, and generation after generation has inherited it. Nothing is as it should be.

This is uplifting, isn’t it? But it’s critical we understand that no one has escaped inheriting sin from Adam and Eve. My two-year-old never had to be taught how to take her friend’s toy, or to demand her way by stomping her foot and screaming. It’s like she came pre-programmed. And in fact, she did. As all of us are—prone to sin from the moment our lives begin. Just as Romans 3:10 says, there is not one person who is righteous, not even one.

When I teach the kids at my church about sin, we always define sin as “anything we do, think, or say that God tells us not to do, think, or say; or anything we don’t do, think, or say that God tells us to do, think, or say in His Word.” That’s a lot of words to simply say that sin is rebelling against God and His Good Plan for us. As alluded to earlier, we 1) are born with a sinful nature that desires its own way rather than God’s; and we 2) choose to sin as we walk through our days.

Yesterday, we read God’s rule about following His example of rest, which is one of His Ten Commandments (the Foundational Law for the people of God from the Old Testament). Paul has God's Law in mind in Romans 3. God gave His children rules, not because He is an impossible-to-please dictator, but so that His people might flourish and have abundant relationships with Him. He gave His children instructions because He loves them and wants life for them. However, we can’t keep the rules—we disobey. We sin. And just as sin separated Adam and Eve from God, it also separates us from Him.

Thankfully, God knew this would be the case. Although we are incapable of being sinless while we live in this broken world, God has provided The Way to fix our relationship with Him so that it is no longer broken.