Recognizing Sin By Remembering Love

The essence of friendship is love.  The essence of love is compassion.  The essence is mercy.  The essence of mercy is sacrifice.  And the essence of sacrifice is humility.  All of this boils down to Christ.  Jesus is the ultimate example of friendship and love.  He gave every it of his very life to save humanity from sin and to reconcile a broken creation to a Holy God.

This is utterly and devastatingly beautiful.  God Himself has overcome sin, cleansing all who come to Him in faith by the blood of the Holy Lamb.  Unfortunately, from time to time, our understandings of sin can become cavalier and nonchalant, as if we lose sight of how disgusting sin actually is.

For the essence of sin is disobedience and seeking to take things into our own hands.  Whenever we sin, we esteem that which is not God to be more valuable than God.  If we recognize sin with the sober seriousness that it warrant, we can then begin to understand why God treats sin with such disdain.

When we sin, we are, in action, indicating that the friendship, the love, the compassion, the mercy, the sacrifice, and the humility that Christ Himself fulfilled in His flesh is insufficient to change us.  As in what Christ did was not enough to stop us from sinning.  As has always been true, every generation of Christianity has its own theological posture.  The last few generations has downplayed sin to such a degree so that some people don't even believe in sin at all.

Needless to say, this is blatantly blasphemous disbelief.  When we neglect or diminish sin, we are in fact equally diminishing and neglecting the work of Christ.  For Christ's work was purposed on overcoming and defeating sin.  When we forget sin, we are in turn forgetting Christ.  Let us then always remember what Christ has done for us, and strive to never diminish sin in light of what Christ has done!