Something in us wants to restore our connection to God, and something in us doesn't.
We want to have a spiritual dimension to our lives but we don't want to have to change who we are. We just want to add to who we are, to improve from where we are.
We want to connect to God and be improved, but we don't want to feel guilty about who we are now or what we've done in the past.
We don't like guilt. We seek to avoid it and resent the idea that we should experience it.
We don't always believe that guilt is bad: we want others to feel guilty when they do something that we see as wrong. We just don't want to feel guilty ourselves.
We don't think that our behavior warrants it. We think that we're OK as we are, and we want to connect to God as we are. We like to imagine God as being near our level. He isn't.
We also don't like to think that there is such a thing as sin.
Having learned that rules don't make people good, we've decided that we'll make people good by allowing everyone to make up his own standards.
We think that everything is relative. There are no absolutes -- or almost none. Just watch TV for a few hours, and you'll see the lack of absolutes.
We're aware of absolutes when we're on the receiving end.
Then its quite clear that some things are simply bad, wrong, and should stop. In other words, it's quite clear to us that some things are sinful.
Sins can include some pretty ordinary things, like anger, greed, and arrogance, for example. When we see someone else being angry, greedy or arrogant, it's often clear that they shouldn't be acting that way.
We lose that clarity when we're the ones doing it. We think we have good reasons for our behavior.
Sins are the things that we do that hurt us, hurt other people, or hurt our society in general.
Actually, because we are all so connected, something that hurts just one, hurts everyone. There are no private sins.
It does matter what you do in the privacy of your own home. It does matter what you think, what feelings you entertain in your heart.
It is appropriate for us to feel guilty because we do things that hurt us/others/society. We all commit sins - fairly often.
Guilt is our sense of what is true and loving telling us that what we're doing is not really honest, not really loving, or both - usually both.
I believe that we've abandoned the idea of sin because we cannot deal with our guilt. We can't deal with our guilt because we recognize that we're mostly incapable of changing our behavior.
We need help. We need to be forgiven for our sins, and we need to be empowered to change.
Only God can forgive us, and only God can change us. I believe that He wants to do both. God loves us more than we can imagine, even as we are.
It is God whom we sin against; so it is His forgiveness we need. I believe that Jesus was God's gift of forgiveness to mankind, His gift of mercy.
It is God who created us and He can - when we are willing - change the spirit within us. He can fill us with His Spirit. Then we become able to see our choices before we make them, before we do things that we regret - before we sin.
We are sinful, and we should feel guilty, but there is a God who loves us and who gave of himself for us.
Read on . . .