Thursday, May 19, 2011

Whatever Happened to Sin?

You don’t see much repentance anymore. There was a day when people openly wept about their sins. Conviction would grip them and nothing else mattered but confession and cleansing. You just don’t see that much these days.

Obviously, we haven’t stopped sinning. I think it has more to do with how much sin content we regularly let into our minds. During simpler days we lived protected lives. There were movies with salacious content but you didn’t have to go see them. TV was mild. Today both mediums constantly show moral perversions so naturally that you would believe those perversions to be normal.

What’s happened is we have lowered the standard of good behavior and raised the bar on bad and blurred the line between them. What was wrong for the last generation is accepted by the next.

During college days Relativism was gaining a strong foothold. Relativism took away absolute truth—absolute right and wrong. The person became his own judge on what was right behavior for him. Almost nothing was left in the wrong category. As a result we, as Christians, were being told what we thought to be sin was merely opinion not fact. If we didn’t want it to be bad we could convince ourselves it was okay for us.

I’m not sure you could come up with a very long list of sins today. Even then, most of those items listed could be scratched off due to mitigating circumstances.

The only fix I can find is to rediscover the standard by which all sin is judged. In the Bible are references to specific things God says we should and shouldn’t do. Violating those commands is sin. Then there are other things mentioned in more general terms that we are supposed to use to classify nonspecific sins. God’s conviction would indicate we are under general obligation.

If I’m serious about living consistently before God, I will pay greater attention to what God has said in reference to my attitudes and actions. And whenever I find I have acted inconsistently with how God wants me to live, I will confess and change.

The world’s image of acceptable behavior cannot be my standard. I’ve committed to honoring a God who has greater plans for my life than the world could ever imagine.

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