You Are a Worse Sinner Than You Know
You are not a sinner merely because you do sinful things. Though that’s true. You are sinner in the first place because from the moment you were conceived in your mother’s womb, you were bent in the wrong direction (Psalm 51:5). That is, your heart longed for the same independence from God that Adam and Eve pursued when they ate of that stupid fruit in the garden. You’ve inherited their rebellious heart and attitude, and not only that, if you were honest, you would admit that you have actively invested a lot of your time and energy into cultivating that rebellion.
So you’re sinful by nature and sinful by choice. You were born broken, unable to see and enjoy the value of God as better and brighter than any other thing in all creation, and you’ve willfully, stubbornly sought other pleasures and other saviors outside of God in your times of joy and sorrow alike. Instead of seeking God alone with an undivided heart, you’ve been much more inclined to a million other things. And that’s called idolatry. You don’t think about God as much as you should. You’re not aware of his presence like you should be aware. When you eat breakfast every morning, you don’t do so in such a way so as to show his great worth to the world. (Remember it’s a command to eat in such a way that you glorify God in your eating [1 Corinthians 10:31].) You use the talents that God himself gave you—the talents that were meant to be used to bring honor to him—and you get good grades or sing well or create art or write or play a sport or make others laugh with your delightful sense of humor in order to get people to notice and applaud you! You rob God of the glory that is due his name when you engage in what you do for your glory and not for his. And there’s a word for such behavior. It’s called treason against the King of the universe. And it’s punishable by death.
By living in such a way, you have effectively kicked God off his throne and dared to sit down in his place. You’ve wanted to receive the praise that he alone is worthy of as the giver of all good things. You’ve wanted to run your life in your way and you’ve spit on his wisdom by thinking you could do a better job. And so have I. And so has every last one of us. Truly, we are more sinful than we know.
Sin is not merely doing bad things. Though it is that. Sin is doing good things with improper motivations underneath. Paul goes so far as to say that you could give away all your money and even your very life for someone, and if there’s not love motivating your giving or your sacrifice, all your “good” deeds are worthless (1 Corinthians 13:3). In fact, they’re evil and repulsive to God. You could even spend your life performing miracles and casting out demons in Jesus’s name, and if all that “ministry” amounts to little more than a show to wow people and get them to like you, one day you’ll stand before Jesus himself and hear him tell you that he never knew you (Matthew 7:22-23). Only those who do the will of Jesus’s Father in heaven will enter into the Kingdom of God (Matthew 7:21). And what is the Father’s will? It’s that people would see and believe in Jesus (John 6:40), and not see and make much of you.
By my estimation, most of you mostly do what’s right most of the time. You’re “good” kids. Yes, even you. You keep the rules and look nice and are well mannered. Jesus made it clear that such external conformity to certain standards is not the kind of righteousness that God requires. You’re not guilty only if you have sex outside of marriage. You’re guilty if you allow your God-given sex drive to cause you to indulge your mind in pornographic images online or in movies, whether you ever act on those corrupted desires or not (Matthew 5:27-30). You’re not guilty only if you murder someone. You’re guilty for the anger and hate you harbor in your heart against a person, whether you ever kill him or not (Matthew 5:21-26).
I could go on and on. Perhaps this will suffice to drive the point home. You’re a sinner, and you’re a much worse sinner than you know.
And your sin is first and foremost an offense to God. Yes, we wrong one another, but we sin against God. After David sinned with Bathsheba, remember what he said in Psalm 51? “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” So even when we do wrong to others, the fact that we’ve disobeyed God is what makes an act sinful.
As such, it is hard to overestimate our guilt before a holy God. Likewise, it is hard to overestimate the amount of shame we’ve brought on ourselves and on our Maker. We’re guilty in God’s court of law, and we’re shameful as his personal works of creation gone bad. We are too guilty to enter his pure and holy presence, and we’re too shameful to be seen around him. The result? Because the heinousness of a crime is directly proportional to the purity and worth of the one sinned against, sin against an infinitely pure and worthy God is infinitely heinous and deserves an infinite punishment.
The just and proper reward of our sinfulness, of our guilt, and of our shame, then, is complete and irreversible separation from the living God forever.
It is a terrible truth. But it is a truth we must all come to terms with. And a truth such as this should also be part of the foundation upon which we build the rest of our lives. We don’t include truths like these as part of the foundations of our lives merely to feel bad about ourselves. We include them because to view them as less horrific than they really are is to view God’s grace as less magnificent than it really is.
So, the bad news comes first. The diagnosis comes before any talk of a cure. Feel the weight of this. Let it have its proper effect on you. There is an improper effect. I’m not saying that you let this fact drive you to despair. I am saying, however, that you should allow this truth to shape you profoundly and prepare you—as it was meant to—to hear the greatest news that has ever been or ever will be.
Other Posts in this Series
Truths to Build Your Life On: Open Letters to the Class of 2020, Introduction
Truths to Build Your Life On: Open Letters to the Class of 2020, Part 1
Truths to Build Your Life On: Open Letters to the Class of 2020, Part 2
Truths to Build Your Life On: Open Letters to the Class of 2020, Part 4