I wish churches would stop focusing on sin. You’ll need to follow me here and see my heart.
I have a picture of the church standing by a highway, cars streaking by. The cars are sin, deadly forces seeking to destroy us. The highway line is that imaginary “line” that we dare not cross, lest sin destroy us.
Understandably, the church is helping people see the danger. “Don’t cross the line. Don’t get into sin. Death awaits.” And we focus on that highway line, ever reaching out to people we think might go into the deadly space. Our focus is fixed.
We want to keep our friends from sin. Our family from sin. Our country from sin. For us, Christianity is the knowledge and the ability to escape from the death of sin and experience life. Unfortunately, I don’t know that you can call that life.
This fixation on the dangers of sin put us in a fearful and cautious space. I don’t know that that’s the life God created for us.
I think there’s a reason the Apostle Paul told us we were no longer bound by penalties of sin. Obviously, consequences accompany sin. So what might he have been trying to get at when he said that?
I imagine a church, standing by a highway, focused on the line, but missing out on what’s behind them. It’s Disney Land.
I see all of the potential and the life God has for those who believe – those who have been freed from the penalty of sin. It’s there for us, but only if we stop focusing on “staying clear of the line of sin” and proactively going after the good things God created. It’s possibilities we’re too non-creative to even imagine.
I wonder if, in our over-attention at keeping people from crossing the line into sin, we miss out on what’s available in the other direction. I wonder if we’re trying to warn people too much instead of showing people the possibilities that await them away from the line of sin.
I wonder what would happen if we exchanged “don’t do this” for “this is the way to more than you could possibly imagine”.
Obviously, the penalty for sin is death for those who don’t accept Christ’s finished work on the cross. But I wonder if in our overzealousness to save people from that penalty, we’ve turned Christianity into a book of rules instead of a book of life. We’ve camped out at the law instead of letting the law lead us to the better things waiting for us on the other side.
What do you think our testimony would look like if we focused more on the possibilities God made for us instead of the risk of sin? What would our lives look like if that was the case? What would our social media posts look like?
