1 John 1:8
Every
journey has some first steps. You need a passport in order to travel
internationally. If you are going across an ocean you need a ticket of some
type, plane or ship. Most of us would have to save some money for the trip. We
would need to pack a suitcase. Don’t forget your toothbrush!
If
you are taking a journey to a new career, you would want to do some research to
make sure you were heading the right direction for you personally. Will the new
career meet your goals, both in the short term and the long? I would want to
know if there would be a paying job at the other end of the training. I also
know that a certain level of satisfaction is needed in our work. Very few
people enjoy every minute of their jobs, but many find enough satisfaction to
keep them going. The satisfaction might be in the paycheck and the paid bills,
rather than in the work itself.
One
important step in our spiritual journey is the acknowledgement of the presence
of sin in our lives. It is not that we are actively participating in sin all
the time. It is instead that the root of sin is inside us. When we do sin acts
they originate in us. We can’t point some other direction in a blame game. Some
have named this the sin nature. The starting point of sin in our lives is us.
John
writes that we can’t claim that this seed of sin doesn’t exist in us. If we
claim that we are the exception to the rule, that we don’t have sin, this claim
doesn’t change the facts. We all have sin in us. No amount of prayer and
Scripture memorization can take it away. It will be with us until we get our
new glorified bodies. And if we don’t believe this we are deceiving ourselves.
We are doing the disappearing card trick on ourselves. And as the magician, we
know right where the card is at all times. We can’t trick ourselves.
So
it is with this first step in our spiritual journey. We can’t hide sin from
ourselves. It is present and we must admit its presence in us, not just in the
world or in other people. It is crouching at our door, as the LORD told Cain
before he killed his brother. And if we can’t accept this truth, we have no
hope of salvation. The truth can’t find root in our heart. Besides, why would
you want to take medicine for a sickness you don’t have? If you don’t have sin,
you don’t need a sacrifice for your sin.
And
yet many today in our world try to say that sin is a nonexistent remnant of a
past and backward way of relating to the world and each other. They want to say
that we have grown beyond such simplistic and controlling concepts. We are more
enlightened than those who lived with such ignorance. We aren’t limited like
they were. We live without such backward restrictions.
But
those who want to deny sin’s existence have to live their lives either with
blinders on their eyes or their head in the sand. Sin is rampant in the world.
The evil that continues to rear its ugly head is real. And those who can’t name
it as it is must invent cleaver ways of avoiding its definition. We can’t talk
about the dangers of Islam because Islam isn’t any better or worse than any
other belief system. They apply whitewash on all the evils done as a result of
those who practice Islam after the example of their prophet Mohammed. They say
it must be a lack of job opportunity that drives them to this violence. Or
their need for better education, or healthcare, or food and water. Any and
every other cause is substituted in a desperate attempt to avoid naming it sin.
And
those who can’t label evil sin, both in themselves and in their world, are
deceiving only themselves. They are declaring that they don’t have the Truth.