We are Not Sin

Sometimes we are afraid that this radical message of love and inclusion will lead us to think we’re the solution to our troubles. I think genuine followers of Jesus worry about being “soft on sin” not because they are judgmental but because they want to be honest.

There is no doubt that sin is the problem. Greed, lust, injustice, racism, misogyny, and abuse are just a few outworkings of sin in the world. But here is the distinction that can liberate us from a diseased core: we are not sin. We are God’s children. Sin is our enemy. Our collective enemy. The distinction is important. If we confuse our identity with our enemy, we despair.

Depravity occurs when our human operating system (our flesh/sinful nature) is taken over by a foreign power—a virus that has corrupted our core. It embeds itself into our operating system in order to kill us. That’s a good descriptor of what sin does. Distorts and embeds, convincing us that we are the disease. The result is a killing, stealing, and destroying of ourselves and our place in this world. This analogy also connotes the kind of emotional energy required to fight back.

When the virus spreads, we start to believe the despairing lies that we suck. That we are terrible. That we are bad. That everyone is bad. If we are already religious and struggling with sin, equating our identity with sin convinces us that we are hypocrites who deserve punishment. Sometimes we deny these thoughts and feelings, but we still wonder. Other times we work ourselves to death trying to prove these inner voices wrong. We keep busy. We get disciplined. We turn super religious.

This explains why self-help isn’t the kind that we need. Self-help is a software answer to a hardware problem. We need an engineer that knows how to recover what already exists. This is where Paul rejoices: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

God is liberating us to fight against sin with him. Goodbye to shame, fear, guilt, condemnation, self-harming behaviors, and toxic egos. Hello to fresh hope.

Respond

You are not a problem; sin is. Name two things in your life that would change if you began to believe this.