Now that I’ve laid the ground work for the ways sin does matter, let me go into the ways it does not. First, Sin does not control your future. The fact that you have sinned countless times is no reflection on tomorrow. You have been and always will be a sinner, and the best you can hope for in this sense is to sin less. God’s love for you is not based on your concrete past or your flexible and yet to be seen future. Also, as far as I can tell, sin has no specific will. The devil, to some extent, really doesn’t care if you steal or lie, so long as you are sinning and find no way out. Funny that God doesn’t care either in the same sense because any and all of His love has defeated any and all sin.
Secondly, as I said earlier, sin does not separate you from God. Yes, it does separate you in terms of being different from Him. He is perfect, you are imperfect. He is sinless and you are sinful. Don’t fret too much over that though because even if man had not ever fallen, we would still not be like God. He would still be glorified and you would still be a man. He would still be all powerful and you would still only have the power that He’s given you. He would still be the source and you still the vessel.
Sin separates your love from God (under certain conditions later discussed), but it does not separate His love from you. Nothing can separate His love from you, and nothing could make Him change the way He feels about you.
Based on what I’ve been taught and know, love works like this. God loves you. Using the love He gives to you, you love others and love Him in return. In theory, this means that nothing can actually separate Him from your love- because your love is His love redirected. I do not believe in man made love.
I’ve heard it said that sin and the enemy cannot resist your weapons; they can only influence your will to use them. I agree with this statement. If your love is God’s love, and nothing can stop God’s love (and God’s power), then nothing can stop your love. You’re like a gate. When it is open, God’s love flows. When it is closed, His love doesn’t flow. The difference is your choice to either open the gate or close it.
Lastly, sin does not stop you from being righteous and powerful. Christ tells us to be holy as He is holy, and He would not tell us to do something that could not be done. (Yes I’m veering away from the perfection argument). Though a righteous man falls seven times, he gets up again. I think as American Christians, or maybe as Christians all over, we’ve come to no longer believe that God can use us because we’re not good enough. It is precisely that belief that stops God from using us. We think that all of the “radicals” in the bible had some special anointing that’s no longer available to us, yet we also think that the New Testament rules apply to us.
One of my favorite people in the bible is Paul. The bible says he was so holy that people could just touch cloths and rags he had used and be healed. Crazy right? Yet this same man said “That I wish to do, I don’t do, and that I wish not to do I do anyways.” This is a clear indicator that sin is not what makes us any different from Paul. Paul was also a sinner.
What makes us different is that He completely believed in and surrendered to the power, and well, and self of God. That is precisely what we’re not doing, or at least not enough. When someone slips through the cracks of our common beliefs system, we call Him radical. We tend to think that he is better than us. We think God loves him more than us. It’s either that or we simply don’t understand and soon give up on understanding.
I don’t know about you, but I want to change the world. I hope you do as well. The way we’re going to do that is to believe how Paul believed. Then and only then will we see miracles and lives saved like Paul saw them.
Keep in mind motivations. You will not change the world if your reason for doing so is to be known. When you fall in love with Jesus, you also fall in love with His creation. Love must be your biggest motivation, and really very little of anything else. Those who seek Him find Him. If you haven’t found Him, you apparently haven’t been seeking Him. The devil is pretty happy about that might I add, and I’d suggest that you make him angry.
One last note. There is a cost. Just as we share in His resurrection, we share in His suffering. While that seems like a downer, we’ve also been told that our momentary troubles aren’t even worth comparing to the glory that awaits us. Me? STOKED.
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