All right. Before we dig into God's word, let's have a prayer for understanding. Lord, I thank you that your mercy is so much more than all of the sin that we could commit that has been committed since the beginning. Lord, we thank you that your grace and your power is more than all the power of sin. And yet sin is something that troubles us troubles us throughout our lives. Lord, as we dig into your scripture and as I deliver the message you put in my heart, I pray for clarity, for wisdom.
Lord, I pray that I would deliver your message faithfully. In Christ's name, amen. And this is the part where I remember that I forgot to get the clicker. Is it Oh, Pastor Brad's going to grab that. Or Jeff. We can start with the scripture passage anyway. And we can up. Thank you. So we're going to talk about sin, which is a heavy kind of a topic. Thank you. Back in May, I preached about forgiveness and we talked about sin. And last time I talked about blood and sin came up there.
There's a lot of places you can go by talking about sin. So if you've got some ideas like, oh, talking about this I'm going to kind of focus in on one idea in particular and we'll see where this goes. So a passage from 1 John. 1 John can come off as a pretty heavy book as we'll see here. 1 John really the way he writes most of the book kind of makes it sound like, and if you sin even once, like that's it. You're obviously not you're not saved.
The spirit's not in you. And then fortunately in chapter 5 he kind of brings that back. So let's have a look and see what the scripture has to say here. This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you. God is light. In him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. But we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus, his son, purifies us from all sin.
If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we've not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us. My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one.
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we've come to know him if we keep his commands. Whoever says I know him but does not do what he commands is a liar and the truth is not in that person. But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know that we're in him. Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did.
This is the word of the Lord. Okay, so our churchy word this week is sin. So first part, what exactly is sin? Well, back in the late '80s I was a first year university student and living far away from home at Waterloo and got involved with an intervarsity group and was part of a Bible study on the book of James. I don't know if every first year university student studies the book of James, but it seems to be a pretty common occurrence. There's so much in there I think that resonates with people that are away from home and experiencing difficult circumstances for the first time.
Consider it pure joy, my friends, when you face trials of many kinds and we were really into that. I noticed partway through this semester though that I seemed to have trouble kind of I wasn't feeling as close to God as I had been before and I was kind of aware of this and wasn't really sure what to do about it and I thought I know what I should do. I'll just kind of do a bit like, like James chapter one. Maybe I should pray. Maybe I should ask God for a little trial to come my way just to kind of draw me close to him.
And if you're already thinking how crazy that is, never do this. I learned an important lesson that week because the Lord gives generously to all who ask. Seek and ye shall find. And so God generously within eight hours blessed me with not just one trial but four. And man, it was it was heavy. And I mean it I definitely did have to rely on God. It did pull me closer. There's got to be better ways to do it than this. So I will come back to this idea a bit a bit later in the sermon.
And it's worth reminding as we talk about sin that sin doesn't have the first word, it doesn't have the last word. How we begin and end, as we did with the songs we sang there, is with the gospel. We look at Ephesians chapter two. It is by grace that we have been saved through faith, not from ourselves. It's a gift of God, not by works. No one can boast. Ultimately, our sins are not going to be counted against us. Jesus has died and taken care of them and sent them as far away as the east is from the west.
And they will never come back to get us. Well, what exactly is sin? When we talk about these churchy words, we often talk about how this word resonates in the culture around us. And sin is not a very popular idea. If you're a Gen Xer who was into Christian music in the '80s, you might remember Steve Taylor had a song called Whatever Happened to Sin. And even in the '80s, and that was 40 years ago now, there was still this idea of like people just don't want to be told that anything they're doing is wrong.
People don't want to hear that there's some kind of judgment or that some behavior is not just dependent on wherever you feel like that there's absolutes. It used to be when you had those little gospel tracts and stuff with the four spiritual laws. The place that you often started when you were talking to someone who is new to Christ or a non-believer was the fact that we're all sin and we've all fallen short of the glory of God. It's tough to do that nowadays to talk to non-Christians like, no, I don't I don't believe that.
No, I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm a good person. Sin has kind of disappeared from our culture. Well, what is sin? I was surprised to find out there's actually not like a really obvious definition of sin in the Bible. I thought there'd be tons of passage saying like this is what sin is and not so much. I mean, sin gets used right near the start. Now here your Bible trivia is the first mention of sin in the Bible is with Cain when he's kind of upset God didn't like his sacrifice.
Like sin is crouching at your door and desires to have you. No real explanation what sin is. It just it seems like the Israelites, the Hebrews knew what sin was. So what is sin? Well, we have an idea. I mean, we understand sin, right? It's disobeying God's commands. Sin is not keeping God's commands and turning away from God and doing our own thing. And the closest you come to kind of a definition is actually again in 1 John. Sin is lawlessness, just ignoring the law, moving away from the law and just suiting ourselves, doing whatever we want to do.
In Hebrew, they got three words for sin. I was kind of surprised here too. There's not just one. There's actually three words. They kind of make a distinction. There's chata which is just kind of a slip. Like oh, just oh, probably shouldn't have said that, shouldn't have done that. Just a sin that's kind of involuntary. You recognize it, but there was no kind of like malice involved. Just it slipped. Then there's avon. Avon is a deliberate a deliberate sin. You get tempted, you get carried away by your sinful nature and like ah, I probably should resist and then you just you sin anyway.
And then they have a third category, pesha. And pesha is like shaking your fist at God, outright rebellion. And what do you think about this? I'm just going to do this anyway. And look at these words. I mean, it's interesting. And sometimes we might think like most of the sins we commit are probably in the first two. Ultimately, of course, any sin is a rebellion against God. It's all pesha. It all fits in that last category. We'll deal with that in just a sec here too.
So we're trying not to sin. It's not how we do. We'd like to not sin. We know it's a good idea to not sin. What's our motivation for not sinning? It could be out of fear, fear of punishment, fear of consequences. I better not do that or something bad's going to happen. It's like, oh, I won't be able to I won't be able to pray if I do that. So sometimes there's fear, not the best motivation. Or there's guilt. I'll feel so bad if I sin.
So I don't want to sin because I don't want that guilty kind of feeling. Maybe even favor. Oh Lord, if you give me this prayer request, there's another classic university kind of thing. Man, if you help me get this assignment done before midnight, I promise I will be so nice to my sister. I will some sort of way you figure like if I'm if I'm really working on controlling sin, God will kind of like that and he'll reward me with some stuff. Now on the other hand, we get this idea of like if bad things start to happen, you're like, man, why are all these things breaking this week?
Oh, must be because I sinned. I think maybe the best motivation for not sinning is gratitude. The idea that we just discussed that Jesus has done everything for us, that willingly went to the cross and paid for our sin, that God gives his own son. And so what's our response to that? Is just wanting to do as he commands, to want to live with him, to want to live a life that's more in line with the righteousness that God requires and that God is. So as we as we think about sinning and not sinning, I mean, hopefully this is where our motivation gets us, as overflow of a grateful heart as opposed to just fear of punishment or trying to curry favor.
Now, I talked a little bit and we talked about blood about the impact sin has. We have forgiveness. We forgive each other. Our sins are forgiven. Ultimately, they're not held against us, and that's good. But here on earth, sins have consequences. We talked about that a bit last time. Your sins have impacts on the people around you. Sometimes your sin hurts somebody. Sometimes it causes problems to other people. It hurts yourself. And so you think like, man, if I if I could really get like a better understanding of just a like maybe how much I sin.
I think we understand that we sin probably on a daily basis, but I don't know if we really understand just how common of a thing sin is in our lives or how much of an impact that has. You think maybe I should pray that God would open my eyes and really see the way he sees sin. Like, no. Don't do that. I learned that lesson before. I don't think we can handle that. I think that would be too much for us to understand just how heavy the weight and the impact and the evil the sin is.
And yet, we can maybe pray for just a little bit more insight than what we've got. Help us to understand where our sin is, where it's coming from, and what it's doing. I think the awareness, we'll come back to this in a bit too, the awareness would help us as we move forward with trying to deal with sin in our lives. And then there's this verse that just always blows me away. Psalm 51. This is David after the famous incident with Uriah and Bathsheba. And David says to the Lord, you against you and you only have I sinned.
And all of this stuff, it's only against you that I sinned. Every time I read that, I think, I don't know. I think you sinned against Uriah when you had him killed. I think you sinned against Bathsheba. I think you sinned against Joab when you made him kill you. I think like there's so many sins that David is going to be so many people were hurt by this, but ultimately it all comes back to it's only against God. All sin is ultimately rebellion. It's ultimately only against God that we have sinned.
Yeah. Heavy topic, right? Well, part two, why do we treat some sins differently than others? So back in September, I was looking at some documents on the CRC network. It's kind of a big website where they've got documents. Other churches can upload things that they use. And we were looking at a sort of a covenant for volunteers of the church. Things you can sign that say here's kind of like yeah I believe these things. And there was one paragraph in this covenant that talked about like and I'm going to try to live a good life.
Sins I'm going to not do while I am representing the church and volunteering for the church. So here's what the paragraph said. Activities that would constitute violations of this standard would include habitual drunkenness, drug abuse, marital unfaithfulness, premarital sex, cohabitation, use of pornography, criminal conduct, physical and verbal abuse. Yeah. Well, I mean you wouldn't want church volunteers openly engaging in this stuff. The more I read about this and talked about it with people and stuff, think like we tend to focus on some of these big kind of obvious sins, right?
We look at these and think yeah there's those sins in people's lives. That's not good. There's a whole lot more sins than the eight or nine that are mentioned in there. And we don't tend to include those. I mean these things are easy for other people to see, I suppose. But if we know that all sin separates us from God, it's not like these sins here are the ones that we need to focus on more. And yet when we look at the culture around us and we see this kind of stuff.
We judge the culture around us. And, anyway, this is something I think describes a lot about the way we tend to see life and the church. So, what about scripture? I mean, it probably has a lot more sins than this, right? So, I decided to do some research. You know, in the in the epistles, Paul often will have a section where he talks about like you know, the NIV will call it rules for holy living or this is this is how you should live. And there's about three or four verses where Paul would say and put this aside and don't do this and don't do this and this is not consistent with Christianity.
And often it's followed up by sections like on the fruit of the spirit and that kind of thing. But there's a bunch of these passages. So, I scanned through the epistles. Every time I found one of these, copied, pasted, took out some of the other words, made a list, sorted it, and counted, took out the duplicates cuz some of the sins are mentioned in more than one epistle. And I came up with a list of sins. Now, I don't know if you can guess, you know, when you shout it out loud, how many sins this is just in the epistles now.
Actually, Paul's epistles. I didn't even go into Peter. How many sins are listed in those passages? 74. It's a lot. And so, when we think about sins that we could be committing or sins in our lives that we should like you know, sometimes you count at the end of the day and think like I only sinned a couple of times. That's pretty good. By the way, burping in a sermon is not a sin. It's like that's just pretty You know how old you are. Anyway yeah.
So, I made a list here. I don't know if this is big enough for you to read. Some of you with really good eyesight might read that. Just kind of drink in like if there's a lot. This is the first 36. And some of them are like yep. Definitely those are pretty serious sins and other ones we look at and say like ah I think I do that one. I didn't really think of that as being a sin quite so much. There's the last group. It's a lot.
And I think part of the reason I mean obviously avoiding this stuff, not doing these things is good for us. We live much better and happier lives when we're not sinning. But at the same time, I think they're also kind of included there as a list of like don't be pointing at other people and saying look at those people out there and how much they're sinning. Like everybody's got some of these. Like you don't have to look too hard to realize that actually I've kind of done that one.
Oh yeah, I've done that one a fair amount lately. And we can focus on things like slave traders like well I guess I haven't done that so that's good. But there's a lot in there. And this is just the epistles. Jesus of course lists a whole bunch more. And Jesus goes even further because then in the Sermon on the Mount famously Jesus says you think you've kept the Ten Commandments. Well that's just great pat. You're proud of yourself for not murdering anybody. But if you have felt rage against somebody, you basically murdered that person.
How many people did you murder this week in traffic perhaps? Oh boy. And then Jesus continues. There's several other sins that he lists in there is like you think this is the sin. It's like you're looking at the outside part of the cup. God cares about the inside part of the cup. There's a lot. And so yes that awareness thing kicks in. You think man I think I've been sinning a lot more than I realized that I was. Last week Pastor Brad talked about church discipline.
And there was a time in a lot of CRCs I think not that long ago where you know the pastor and the elder might show up at your door and say you know there's there's something that we've noticed is not right in your life and we need to challenge you and maybe it's good to step aside from this ministry for a bit and we need to kind of work on some healing here. There was like a church discipline and it often tended on some of the biggies.
I don't remember hearing too many stories of a pastor and elder show up in someone's house and saying, yes, we've noticed that you've been you've been jealous of an unacceptable amount. And we want to work with you on this jealousy and pray with you and you probably should step aside from your ministry for a bit while you get this jealousy under control envy or I mean go back to the list. How many things back here is like yeah, your pride has been getting a little bit a little bit out of control and we need to work on that.
You're feeling kind of resentful. And there's a lot of stuff. Now I think as Pastor Brad can talk about that, that's not really sort of the most important. It's good for us to hold each other accountable when we see sin while not sort of feeling like we can judge other people and all that stuff. But then there's the inner discipline of like okay, so how do I respond to this? As my awareness of my own sin increases how do I respond? How do we deal with sin in our lives?
So if you were around in the '80s, you might remember a TV show called Cheers. You might recognize this guy here, Cliff Clavin, who was the know-it-all. And anytime somebody would mention everything, he would almost every once in a episode is like, well actually, you know, he's got his broad Boston accent and he would come up with all kinds of facts and everything and people are often kind of annoyed by this. One time, one episode, Cliff realized like people didn't like him and he didn't want to be like that anymore.
So he went to go see this behavior modification guy. The guy said, I got a perfect idea. What we're going to set you up with a little shock device. And he had the button and he would go and sit in the bar and just listen while Cliff interacted with his friends and stuff. And every time he started the know-it-all routine, he just pressed the button bit like a dog shock collar thing and he'd get a little shock. It's like right, okay. Sorry. I shouldn't do that anymore.
So as the episode goes on, Cliff is talking and then right. And the guy sits in the corner. But after a while, it starts happening a lot. And Cliff is like jumping like every time he opens his mouth the guys like gets him. Cliff gives him a sharp look. Sorry, my bad. Oh, slipped. Eventually Cliff gets so upset near the end of that so he runs over and grabs the button from the guy and says, let's see how you like it and presses the button forgetting that he's still wearing the shock collar.
Do you wonder if we had some kind of little device that made us to be aware of whether your smartwatch gives you a little tap every time you sin or a little light that comes on it's like really seriously oh man how much we'd be aware of like man I guess I'm sinning a lot more. I don't have one of these things. I mean the Holy Spirit of course is good at helping us with this and again be careful what you pray for but one of the nice things about preaching a sermon is I get a few weeks to really kind of dig into the topic and wrestle with it and try some things and sometimes do some experiments.
And so I did ask God if he could help me with just open the door a crack. Could I get a bit more of an idea of just how frequently sin comes into my life and man it was it was a lot. I guess I thought I thought somehow my sins would be countable that you could kind of get to the end of the day and you could you could ask God for forgiveness. I mean we know big picture our sins are forgiven. We're also called to ask for forgiveness for our sins.
You can maybe kind of list off the 10 or 12 20 on a bad day. Man it's not. It's it's not countable at all. It's like man I feel like I burned out that little bulb that comes on and my family's probably thinking like oh that explains a few things the last couple of weeks. It's it's intense when you realize just you fall short so repeatedly. Now again yes the gospel ultimately these are not going to condemn us but sin is still nasty and one of the nasty things with sin hadn't realized is that sin can be contagious.
People kind of like we're always noticing each other and I mean when you are starting to sort of like not care about a certain sin and move on with it other people see that and it can easily sort of pass to someone else like well actually I'm kind of doing that I think gossip is a classic example right? Start gossiping about somebody and someone else like well I feel like maybe I'm going to share a few gossipy tidbits too and next thing you know it kind of spreads sin can be contagious that was a new one for me that sin not only can harm other people by your direct actions but also it can pass from person to person.
So all right how do we deal with sin in our lives? This is kind of what we want right? And the thing with sin of course is I mean we've said this a lot of times we hear this all the time in church it's not about you just trying real hard. It's not about you just saying okay I'm just going to double down and triple down and just like work as hard as I can to focus and concentrate on not sinning anymore. It has to come from the spirit working in you.
God's going to do all the verbs but there's kind of two ways to go about this. One is to be realize there's a certain sin in your life think like here's this sin X and it seems to be like a favorite of mine or one that I kind of like whatever you're thinking like that's one I want God to help me deal with that one and you pray about that and you hand it over to God and you kind of make that your focus and say like Lord just I want to give that up.
Now that's easier said than done right? Sometimes it feels almost more like a letting go of just letting go of some control and saying like Lord like I'm just going to let you take that and take it from me. Sometimes it's even just like but I it's hard and so maybe there's that phrase of like it's not so much that I'm willing to give up that sin but I'm willing to be made willing if that makes sense. I heard somebody say that phrase this week I like that I'm willing to be made willing Lord can you make me willing to give this up, get this area of my life gone?
So, that's one way to do it. Of course, if you if you find that like God has really helped me with that area of sin, but there's a lot more to work on. And if you're ever not sure, just like open the Bible and start reading. The other approach is more of a focusing on something else. I'm sure you've heard this thing a bunch of times before about the pink elephants, right? Whatever you do, do not think about pink elephants. Nobody. First one that thinks about a pink elephant loses.
And of course, we've all just lost the game. It's more fun with teenagers anyway. So, we've all just lost the game. I can see by some of your faces. So, sometimes when you focus on one thing so hard, it gets big in your mind and then that actually feels like that's the big thing. And the danger sometimes of focusing too much on your sin is you're spending all your time focusing on your sin. So, what if you flip that around? If you just spend so much more just replace it.
Just think about something different. The only way to win the pink elephant thing is to think about the beach or something or whatever and just think about something else entirely. Just focus on God. Just focus on being in his presence all day of never trying to never really leave. Again, this makes it sound like trying. It's like, okay, so we just got to try a little hard and double down and just think about God all the time. And not really though. Just being willing to sit in God's presence all the time.
You tend to not sin when you're in the middle of praising the Lord about something in your head. You tend to not sin too much when you're kind of running through scripture in your mind, when you're looking around and seeing everything through God's eyes and being thankful for everything that he's done. I used to work with a woman who had gotten herself into the habit of saying, thank you, Lord, for everything. Good things, bad things, thank you, Lord. Someone says, I just noticed your car has a flat tire.
Thank you, Lord. Or look, I've I this thing here. I'm going to thank you, Lord. I want to encourage you to thank you, Lord. No matter what it was, there's a lot of ways to do this, to pray and to open yourself and to rest on God and say, you know what? And the more you do that, So I want to try to turn this sermon into a self-help thing, but this is stuff we're kind of wrestling through. The more we open ourselves up to God, the more our focus is on God, the less we're going to be dealing with sin in our lives.
There's that phrase, willing to be made willing. Find sometimes you say it, but it's good to also read it too. It's like, yeah, willing to be made willing to get closer to God to lose that sin that has been bogging me down. Now I said we're going to start and end with the gospel because we don't really want to leave it with sin, right? Ultimately, our sins are not going to be held against us. Some of us have a hard time really accepting that. I know there's a lot of Christians that just sort of beat themselves up and feel like I'm just I'm not good enough.
Like no, I've I've I've done too I'm just such a selfish person. I've done too many bad things. Like God can't love me. God can't do that. It's like you're saying God can't? Seriously? But sometimes we need to preach the gospel to ourselves. We need to remind ourselves on a daily basis how this works. And again, this is a phrase I heard recently, but I like that one. Preach the gospel to yourself. Sharing the gospel with other people is great. Sharing the gospel with yourself is also really necessary.
Two good verses that I love for this, if you're a note taker, I'd encourage you to jot at least these scripture references down. Galatians 2:20. I It's really personal, right? I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in this body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. And forget once a day, like once an hour, like this one you preach this one to yourself constantly.
Now, this next one from First John, I talked about at the end of First John, he does kind of show like yes, Jesus has actually made this all possible. So here I italicize the eyes cuz he says we, but I think we can personalize this and say I. This is love. Not that I loved God, but that he loved me and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for my sins. Jesus would have done it all over again if you were the only person that was going to benefit.
He would have gone to the cross just for you. And he did go to the cross for just you. Just that just you of course is all of us. Not that I loved God, but that he loved me. Amen. Let's pray. Lord, I thank you that despite all that we do, that you love us in an unimaginable way, more than we can get our heads around. And sometimes we wonder why or how you could love us when we continue to sin, we continue to turn away.
Lord, we are amazed and we are grateful. And Lord, as we struggle with sin Lord, help us. Move your spirit in us. Help us to be aware of the little sins that we maybe don't even realize we commit. Help us to help us to be willing to be made willing. Lord, let us let us seek you out and focus on you in increasing amounts. Ultimately, Lord, it's not us that's going to do it. You're the powerful one. You do everything. And so Lord, move in our lives and save us from our sin.
In Christ's name, amen.