John Wesley as a boy once asked his mother, “What is sin?” His mother (Suzanna Wesley) who had no seminary training, or formal advanced education, and was the mother of 17—responded in this way:

SIN IS WHATEVER:

• Weakens your sense of reasoning,

• impairs the tenderness of your heart,

• obscures your sense of God or,

• takes away your relish for spiritual things.

In short, if anything increases the authority of the flesh over the Spirit, no matter how good it is in and of itself—that to you is sin.

The following is adapted from an article entitled, Hard Times, by Larry Crabb in Marriage Partnership Magazine, Spring Edition 1998:

Sin came into the world when the first couple refused to trust God as entirely good. Ever since Adam and Eve concluded that God can’t be trusted with the unanticipated problems of temptation and doubt, their descendants have agreed that certain difficulties in life go beyond God’s ability or willingness to handle. This suspicion that God isn’t worthy of absolute trust lies at the root of sin. Until that suspicion’s exposed, we’ll handle our problems superficially at best and without real peace.

Satan’s goal is to keep the revelation of God through Christ under wraps. He toils to persuade us that there’s no adequate reason to believe God is good. He points to the injustice and heartaches of life as evidence that God isn’t worthy of trust—that God’s holding out on us.

And to achieve his purpose, there’s one central strategy: encouraging us to focus on everything but the one thing that provides God the platform to fully reveal his grace — our sin. Satan encourages us to:

• Notice another person’s sin more than our own

• Define sin as less heinous that it really is—perhaps regarding it as understandable, and in some cases even desirable

• Explain sin as a legitimate reaction to life’s disappointments and, therefore, worthy more of compassion than judgment

• Think of self-hatred and shame as a more serious problem than sin

• Treat sin as something merely naughty, like a childish prank

• Evaluate sin as a merely regrettable path to legitimate relief from pressure and pain— a path made necessary by whomever designed the world.

As long as we focus on life’s trials and disappointments, feeling our pain more deeply than we feel the pain we cause God, we’ll struggle to believe in His goodness.

A few other thoughts on the subject of sin:

• It happens all too often that people try to normalize sin by getting others to buy into it.

• Until we understand what sin is, we’ll never take its consequences seriously. (Ravi Zacharius)

• Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden; it is forbidden because it is hurtful.

• Whenever God is knocked out, sin is minimized.

“There is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12)

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