Tag: sin

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Sin at Christmas – Ezekiel 16:59-63

A Lifeway survey in 2016 indicated that 67% of Americans believe that they are sinners, but 75% believe that little sins don’t condemn us. Among evangelicals, those numbers were 75% and 53%. Better, but far from ideal. Why are we talking about sins when discussing Christmas? Because to understand the immensity of Christmas we must understand the immensity of salvation, which means we must understand the immensity of what we are being saved from.

Ezekiel here is discussing that very thing here. God has judged the people of Israel for their sins and sent them into captivity. When we begin to make sin insignificant, we open the door to disaster. We can see that in American culture, where we are always seeking others to blame for the choices that we make.

“Whatever became of sin?” The psychiatrist, Karl Menninger – no friend to the church – asked this forty-two years in his book of the same name as he watched the shift of personal responsibility away from the individual. He wrote:

The word ‘sin,’ which seems to have disappeared, was a proud word. It was once a strong word, an ominous and serious word. It described a central point in every civilized human being’s life plan and life style. But the word went away. It has almost disappeared—the word, along with the notion. Why? Doesn’t anyone sin anymore? Doesn’t anyone believe in sin?

Menninger warned that should the concept of sin disappear, so too would the concept of a moral society. We see some of that in the passage here, but we also have the concept here of a covenant.

God was in covenant with the people of Israel – as He is with us today through the work of Christ. He enters into this because of His great love for us. Not because of our own capacity or lovable nature, but because of His person and love.

Ezekiel calls forward to this atonement here, in verse 63 —God Himself will reach into the world and bring His children into the Eternal covenant by covering over their sin.

But if we minimize that sin, we minimize the atonement and we minimize the wonder of God’s grace in that atonement. If we understand the weight of our sin, we understand the incredible grace that we have been given.

Jonathan Edwards is most known for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. But most of his sermons were about grace – why did that Sermon loom so large? Because that clear statement of the horrors of sin and judgement provide the context for the mighty, overwhelming grace that Edwards was so passionate about.

In Dynamics of Spiritual Life, historian Richard Lovelace presents a history of spiritual renewals in light of biblical models. His conclusion is that the unifying thread of revivals across time is a clear understanding of the depth of sin.

Christmas is not small and sentimental, Christmas is robust and strong because Christmas is the inbreaking of God’s love into the darkness of our sin. The wonder of Christmas is the wonder at our salvation from that darkness.

– Sermon Notes, Jeff Sickles, Snohomish Evangelical Free Church, Snohomish, WA, December 5, 2021

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Do We Know Christ? – 1 John 2:1-6

We’ve been reading John’s epistle where he has shared his eyewitness knowledge of how God wants a relationship with us and made a way to make that happen through Christ.

Now John is writing about how that plays out. Christ is both our advocate, our parakletos – the term means a helper or a legal representative – and our propitiation, our hilasmos, the sacrifice made to make us right with God. It’s like our lawyer or even the police officer giving us a ticket taking on the penalty we owe.

The third word that deserves closer attention is “abide” or “meno” – this is what Christ enables for us, staying, remaining within the grace of God, making our home within His presence.

This all helps us understand one of the key things John is trying to convey, namely how we are to deal with our own sin. He has just told us that all we have to do with our sins is to confess and repent, which naturally leads to the idea that we can avoid changing our behavior and just repent at intervals. But this is like a child who doesn’t worry about dirty diapers, since they are going to get changed anyway. But like that child we are to grow and develop. We are to be focused on living a life that pleases God, like an athlete trains (1 Cor 9). John’s goal and ours is that we do not sin.

But! If we do sin, Christ Himself is advocate and sacrifice for us and for those of the whole world.

That’s the backdrop against which John goes deeper into the discussion of sin. If we say we know Christ in this way, but make no effort to keep His commandments? Then we don’t actually know him and in fact are lying, possibly to ourselves as well. What are these commandments? Christ sums it up as “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.” If we do not love like this, or put ourselves towards that love, then we likely have not really engaged Him as our advocate and propitiation.

Compare this love to romantic love, that draws you to spend more and more time with the object of your affection, that draws you to bend your own desires even personality more and more towards them. How much more should a love for God Himself bend us towards Him and His commandments.

This is difficult. Serving is difficult. Giving money is difficult. Loving our neighbor is difficult. Loving our enemies is even more difficult, let alone those who persecute us! Not just love, but even forgive. And part of those commands is to pass on the knowledge of Christ and His commands (the Great Commission). John tells us we can know if we are Christian if we follow these commands but he never says it’s going to be easy.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, September 19, 2021

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Lies, Anger, Laziness – Ephesians 4:25-28

Paul here is getting to the “application section” of this part, going into specifics of what we should be “taking off” in order to put on Christ. Specifically, don’t lie, don’t be angry, and don’t be lazy.

In each of these, he gives us a negative instruction, then the positive response, and then the reason for it.

The first is to “put away falsehood,” in language that calls back to Zechariah and God’s promise to return to Jerusalem.

This instruction can be confusing when we look at people all across the Old Testament who deceive people constantly and are often commended for it – Rahab, Jael, David, for a few examples. Ultimately, though, this is about motivation – there are rare occasions where a fear of the Lord will make a deception the right thing to do, but clearly deception, broadly speaking, is something God hates. Proverbs is full of clear instruction not to lie, and Revelation puts liars square in the group of people who will be condemned.

It is also about context – Paul is writing about relationships within the body of the church. As John Chrysostom writes,

Will the foot tell a lie, and not report the truth as it is? And what again? If the eye were to spy a serpent or a wild beast, will it lie to the foot? Will it not at once inform it, and the foot thus informed by it refrain from going on? And what again, when neither the foot nor the eye shall know how to distinguish, but all shall depend upon the smelling, as, for example, whether a drug be deadly or not; will the smelling lie to the mouth?

The next instruction is to not sin in our anger. This is a direct reference to Psalm 4, in which David preaches to his enemies. It also echoes James, who asserts “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” There are two different words here, one being anger, in which we must not sin, and “para-anger” or resentment, which we should not let last the day.

This one is a very present temptation, abs can feel overwhelming. We need the power of Christ to change us. Spurgeon said, “only in salvation from sin is there salvation from wrath.”

Next, do not steal, or more broadly, we must not be lazy. But more than that, at must work diligently – in order to be generous. That is the purpose of our diligence and hard work.

Paul in here also gives a parenthetical – all these (perhaps anger in particular) are things we do to avoid giving the devil a foothold, in our lives, in our relationships and in our church. Each of these could be seen as small, mundane instructions, but they are the armor and defense against the attacks against us.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, November 15, 2020

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Off With the Soiled Clothes – Ephesians 4:17-24

This passage matches up well with Colossians 3,hitting many of the same themes likely around the same time in Paul’s life. Both passages call the members of the church first to stop behaving as nonbelievers – referred to as “Gentiles” which is notable since the church itself was full of Gentiles! But as he makes clear elsewhere the gentiles of the church have been “grafted in” – and the Jews in the church are certainly not exempt from behaving like those in the culture around them.

What does that look like? A hardened heart, calloused to sin, but instead seeking the impure and wicked. Even greedy for it!

Paul specifically is serving against antinomianism, the idea that one we are saved we no longer have to worry about following the law. There were those in the church at Ephesus and other congregations who pushed the idea, and Paul here and elsewhere objects to it emphatically.

“That is not how you learned Christ” – not just “about” Christ, but Christ Himself in relationship. There is a difference between learning about someone, and learning them themselves. Though Paul does not assume that this is true of everyone there.

They learned to put off the old self, through Paul’s teaching in person and his letter to the Romans that would likely have circulated by now. The language is the same as changing out of old clothes, from soiled or otherwise dirty clothing into the clothes that are worthy and appropriate for their status as children of God. You can reference the letter to Sardis in Revelation, where some have soiled their white garments – or you can look to Lazarus, raised from the dead and taking off the old grave clothes right away.

Or you can look at the prodigal son – and like the prodigal son, we have to recognize when we are at the pig sty that life is better in our father’s house – where he will put a new robe on us and celebrate.

We are all called to this kind of repentance, and the more we become like Christ, the more we see in our lives that does not line up and needs repentance.

We also need to change ourselves at the mental level – not just responding to a feeling of guilt, but a fundamental renewing of how we think about ourselves, others and God.

This conviction of sin may feel like a heavy load, but it is a part of God’s grace, showing us the path to oneness with Him.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, November 8, 2020

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Dead in Our Sins – Ephesians 2:1-3

At the close of chapter 1, we saw that the job of the Church is to do the will of Christ – we are the body of Christ and he in turn is the Head of the church. And we are to seek that will in prayer and the study of the scriptures, and to pray for opportunities and boldness to share God’s love and Christ’s message of hope.

That followed the opening of the epistle, when Paul erupted with the praise of God for his gifts, in particular, salvation. Then he moved on to a prayer for the Ephesians, of both thanks and for the further refinement of their faith.

At the beginning of chapter 2, Paul zeroes in on “you,” dead in your sins. We are not on our deathbed and needing to accept medicine, we are dead and decaying. We are not drowning and needing to grab a life preserver, we are dead, bloated and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. We need the Father to do for us what he did for the Son – to raise us from the dead. We have no part in our justification – we were helpless to accomplish any part of it.

He uses the death metaphor, and then slavery. We are enslaved to three things – the course of the world, the ‘prince of the power of the air’, and the desires of our flesh.

The world of full of ideas and philosophies that are contrary to the truth of God, and we much be aware and on our guard against them. Likewise, the devil, the prince of the lower atmosphere, also at work in the “sons of disobedience” – not something we talk about a lot as a church, but maybe we should? Jesus did, and Paul will even more as we go through Ephesians.

So we have these outside influences, but ultimately we all have lived in our own passions and fulfilling our own desires. We have all broken faith with God and are “children of wrath.”

We must understand the hopelessness and despair that surround the status that God saved us out of, so that we are properly grateful for the greatness of our salvation.

This should also guide how we see others. Those around us are dead in their sins, and we have the secret of life.

-Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, August 23, 2020