After I moved out from my parents’ home at age eighteen, my brother Roger was my first roommate. My parents were very kind and gave us a sofa bed of theirs to put in the living room of our apartment. We transported the sofa bed from my parents’ home to our apartment in an open, flatbed, pick-up truck. We had to travel on an interstate highway to get from the point of pick up to drop off, and at one point along the highway, one of the back cushions to the sofa bed flew out of the bed of the truck. My brother Roger quickly pulled over to the side of the highway and parked. We both got out of the vehicle and ran back to the side of the road beside the spot where the sofa cushion was lying in the middle of the road. There was just one problem. This was in California and there were cars constantly whizzing past us at 55 miles per hour or faster. The good news was that all of the cars were going around the sofa cushion, that is, until we got back to the place where we could run out and retrieve the cushion. Just at that moment in time, a truck came along and plowed right over the cushion, sending up a cloud of feathers.
Roger and I were rather down in the mouth about this. There was no way that we were going to be able to hide from our parents what had happened to the sofa bed cushion. Our parents would soon be coming over to see our new apartment and celebrate with us. It would be obvious when they walked into our living room that the sofa was missing a cushion, and it was all because of our carelessness in not securing the cushion for transport in the first place.
Why do I tell this story? Well, we all have a similar, though bigger problem in life. With the wonderful gifts we have been given by our heavenly parent, we have all thought, said or done things that are careless, or worse, and there is no way to hide it. The question is, “What are we going to do about it?”
I have entitled this sermon, “Dealing with the ‘S’ Word”. I wonder what people seeing the sign this week in front of church thought I might talk about. Well, the ‘S’ word I am referring to is a word we don’t like to use much anymore in our modern world. The word is “sin”.
1 John 1:8-10, is the next section of the New Testament letter we are studying. In that section, John shows us two dead ends when it comes to dealing with our sin problem, and one way through. Listen for God’s word to you…
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 have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives.
The first dead end that John talks about is the denial of the sinful nature.
“If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” Here we must go back to basics and ask: What is sin? The word means simply “to miss the mark” or “to fall short of a target”.
Think of shooting arrows. We pull back the arrow on the string and let it fly. Then imagine that the arrow, not only misses the bull’s eye, but falls short of the target altogether. Perhaps we try again. We move closer to the target and shoot, but then the arrow misses the target once more. Then imagine realizing that no matter how many times you move closer to the target and shoot your arrow again, you miss, because the target is an infinite distance away.
God created us perfect, but now, no matter how hard we try in our own power, we cannot hit the target. We fall short. We sin.
William Barclay says, “To fail to be as good a father, mother, wife, husband, son, daughter, workman, person as we might be is to sin; and that includes us all.”
It seems that John may have been combating the error of some people to whom he was writing who denied that they even had a sinful nature. Many people down through history have denied that they have a sinful nature. Some people today say that our human problem is not sin, but lack of education. They suggest if we are educated properly then our problems will gradually disappear. Education is a wonderful thing. I am glad that I have had all the educational opportunities I have had. I want as many people in the world as possible to have as much education as possible. However, education alone will not solve our moral problems. Education alone does not provide a relationship with God. We live in perhaps one of the most well-educated ages of all time, yet humanity’s problems have not gone away.
For the past two thousand years, the Church has taught that God created human beings perfect, but that humanity has fallen from that original goodness and now we all have a sinful nature. Education has not and cannot solve our sin problem. Paul says in Romans 5:12 that “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way, death came to all men, because all sinned.” John says that if we deny this, then we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us.
Brian Coffey tells the following story…
My mother’s grandfather was a coalminer in the hills of eastern Kentucky. She called him Grampa Joe. By all accounts he lived hard, worked hard, and drank hard most of his life. When he was sober, he was the loving and beloved patriarch of the clan; he told wonderful stories, and the grandkids loved to sit on his lap. But when Grampa Joe was drinking, he would disappear for weeks at a time, choosing whiskey and brothels over wife and family.
Late in his life, Grampa Joe contracted liver disease from the alcohol and black-lung disease from the coalmines. He was hospitalized, waiting for death to come. My mother, who was 19 years old at the time and a brand-new Christian, went to visit her beloved Grampa Joe. She cared about him and wanted him to know that God loved him. She wanted him to have the chance to respond to the forgiveness available in Christ. So she sat by his bed and gently outlined the message of the gospel to Grampa Joe.
After listening politely to her presentation, Grampa Joe looked up and said, “I don’t believe I’ve ever sinned.”
She was shocked, because the whole family knew about his lifestyle. She said, “But Grampa, we’ve all done bad things. Can’t you think of just one thing you’ve done that was wrong?”
He pretended to think for a minute, and then said, “I take it back, I take it back. I have sinned—once. I voted Republican one time.”[1]
That is the first dead end John mentions when it comes to dealing with sin. The first dead end is denial of the sinful nature altogether. The second dead end John talks about is the denial of sinful actions.
Some people may not deny that human beings have a sin nature in some general sense, yet they still fail to see how they, specifically, have committed any sins. This attitude may not be as uncommon as you think.
When I was at Princeton Seminary every Master of Divinity student had to spend some time in field education. We would be assigned to some church or ministry, have a supervisor, and the supervisor would report on our ministry experience, and we would get a credit for that which would count toward our degree. My best friend in seminary, Richard Burnett, who was from the South, was assigned for a time to a Presbyterian church in the Philadelphia area. On Sunday evenings, when we returned to the seminary from our field assignments, Richard and I would often get hoagies from our favorite Princeton restaurant, Hoagie Haven, and we would bring our sandwiches back to his room or mine, and we would chat together over our informal dinner.
One Sunday evening Richard said to me, “You won’t believe what I heard in my adult Sunday School class today.”
“Try me.”
“There was this man in my class, an elder in the church. He came up to me after the Sunday school lesson and he said, ‘Richard, I have just one problem with what you said this morning. I don’t think I have ever sinned.’”
Richard was so taken aback by this that he paused for a moment and thought about the situation. Then he thought of a counter question. He said to this elder in the church, “We are having Communion today. If you have not sinned, why do you reckon Jesus died on the cross?”
The elder responded, “For the sins of humanity.”
Richard asked, “Do you reckon you are part of humanity?”
I do not remember how that conversation ended, but it is a startling example of the fact that there are people, even people in leadership in Christian congregations, who do not believe they have ever sinned, though they would not deny that other human beings have sinned.
However, this is not the only way that sinful actions are often denied, even by Christians. Some Christians, while admitting that they have sinned in the past, deny that they sin anymore.
Last Sunday I mentioned John Wesley as an example of someone who believed in perfectionism. For example, Wesley made this statement at the age of 82:
I am never tired in my work. From the beginning of the day or the week or the year to the end I do not know what weariness means. I am never weary of writing or preaching or travelling; but am just as fresh at the end as at the beginning. Thus it is with me today, and I take no thought for tomorrow.
Statements like that make me want to ask Wesley, “Really?”
I believe that 1 John 1:8-10 and passages like Romans 7 argue against any doctrine of Christian perfection. John says that if we claim we have not sinned, then we make God out to be a liar and God’s Word then has no place in our hearts.
I actually find such passages of Scripture as 1 John 1:8-10 and Romans 7 encouraging. Verses such as these remind me, that if I still find sin in my life, after being a Christian for forty-five years, I need not be despondent. The bottom line is this: Christians continue to sin in this life, right up to death’s door. Therefore, if you are still a sinner, and if I am still a sinner (and I am), then we are in good company.
Martin Luther talked about being at the same time a sinner and justified (declared righteous in God’s sight through faith in Jesus Christ). That is where we are as Christians in this life: “Simul just et peccator,” at the same time justified and sinners.
I like Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s response to the idea of Christian perfectionism. The story is told about Pastor Spurgeon being confronted by a man who claimed to be without sin. Intrigued by the man’s claims, Spurgeon invited the man into his own home for dinner. After listening attentively to this man’s claims of perfection for quite some time over their shared meal, Spurgeon suddenly threw a glass of water in the man’s face. Naturally, the man was rather upset and expressed his anger toward Spurgeon rather forcefully. To this, Spurgeon replied, “Ah, you see the old man within you is not dead, he had simply fainted and could be revived with a glass of water!”
Thus, John shows us two dead ends when it comes to dealing with sin. One is to deny the sinful nature altogether, the other is to deny specific sinful actions in some way or another.
If we still think we never sin, Pastor Tom Leinbach gave me a good question to ask ourselves. The question is: “Have I ever loved God or my neighbor perfectly?” Let me press that point a little further… “Have I loved God with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength?” “Have I loved my neighbor as myself?” “Have I done these things consistently, throughout my life, with total perfection?”
If our answer to any of those questions is “no” then we have to figure out a way to deal with the ‘S’ word.
Thankfully, John tells us the proper way to deal with sin, namely: confession.
What does it mean to confess? The Greek word that is translated as confess means “to say the same word”. In other words, to confess means to say the same word that God says. When God says that we are his adopted children through Christ, and we agree with that and say that it is true, then we are making a confession. When God says that we are sinners, and when he convicts us of specific sins, by the power of his Spirit working through Scripture, and we agree with God’s statement, then we are confessing sin.
John says that if we do our part and confess our sins, then God will do his part and forgive us. Specifically, John says that God is faithful and just in order to forgive us. Now, we can perhaps understand what John means when he says that God is faithful. In this context, God is faithful to his promise to forgive. He has promised that when we confess our sins, he will forgive us. He is faithful to that promise every time we confess.
However, how is God just? After all, if God was really just, he would condemn us for our sins because that is what our sins deserve, is it not?
That is true. However, justice in this context refers to a different aspect in God’s nature and plan. Tom Wright explains that in the death of Jesus, God has shown himself to be just, to be in the right. Through the death of Jesus, God is putting the whole world to rights, and us with it. We will talk more about that next week.
However, for now, we need to make sure we see one more thing that John tells us… When we confess our sins, God is not only faithful and just to forgive us, to let go of our sins, so to speak, but God also promises to purify us of all unrighteousness. There is a two-fold action that takes place every time we confess sins. First, God forgives us of our sins, he lets them go, because we have agreed with him about our sin, we have come clean about it, and because Jesus has died on the cross for our sins. As if that was not good enough, God does one thing more: he cleanses us completely of our sin, and in fact, he gives us the righteousness of his Son Jesus Christ. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
In case you are wondering what happened with the sofa bed I mentioned at the beginning of this message. What happened was this… We were honest with my parents about what happened to the cushion, and they supplied a solution to the problem: some pillows judiciously placed to replace the missing cushion.
Our God says that if we are honest with him about our sins, he will not only forgive us, but replace the missing cushion, torn up by our carelessness, our sin, with something even better: the righteousness of his Son Jesus. Let us thank him for that indescribable gift…
[1] Brian Coffey, from the sermon, “How Bad Is Too Bad?” (2-24-02); submitted by Kevin A. Miller, vice president, Christianity Today International
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