personal sin

One of the fundamental challenges to actually growing spiritually is self-deception. This is why anyone starts telling you how you should think about any issue, whether it is moral, political, social, religious, whatever, ask them if they believe in sin. If they say, “Yes,” then you know they have to have some concept of a God whom sin is working against. There are standards that are inherent to who we are.

Then when you are being told you need to fear global warming, homosexual teachers, Marxism, the vast Right Wing conspiracy, (fill in the ________), you simply reply, “What is the sin that you are currently struggling with?”

You see actually making the world a better place to live begins and ends with personal transformation. Becoming a different person who can do the things that are necessary for benefiting the life of others. This is the little secret that no “activist” will let out.

Using the metaphor of an organism, we are only as healthy as the individual building blocks of the cells. Sick cells, unhealthy organism. Non-transforming people, society in trouble. No matter how wonderful your ideas are, unless they are being lived out through a person who is dealing with his/her sin and becoming more and more who God would have him/her be, your political views, morals outrages and all the rest are pretty much garbage.

Don’t waste your breath telling me what I need to be doing or not doing until we have a conversation together first about what is the personal sin you are struggling with most lately. Oh, and make sure you let me know anything you tell me you may be dead wrong.

Someone else had all of this in mind.

1 Corinthinans 13 (The Message)
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2 If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.