Question 7: What is sin?
Past “What is…” Posts:
Question 1: What is the gospel? | Response
Question 2: What is truth? | Response
Question 3: What is evangelism? | Response
Question 4: What is prayer? | Response
Question 5: What is theology? | Response
Question 6: What is church? | Response
[For more information on what to do with this post - go here and here.]
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Sin? It’s not good.
Sin is basically a lack of love. When we don’t love God enough, we don’t obey Him. When we don’t love others enough, we do things that hurt them.
Maybe simplistic but it is kind of what Jesus taught.
sin describes any thought or action that doesn’t directly ‘participate’ in God.
I think we far too often get caught up in thinking of sin as doing someting “bad” for which a person deserves to be punished (typically by other persons, not God). I think sin is actually doing those things that move us away from God rather than toward God. The resulting disconnect from God is the real ‘punishment’.
A logical part to your series :)
Sin is committed by humans and is the result of a rejection of the Way of the Creator, and that way is the way of Jesus described by his creed: love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and all of your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.
The result of sin is brokeness and death, both physical and spiritual. Because of the willful choice of Humans, all of creation is broken and in need of restoration, including the Eikons of God. Without restoration through the provisions of God through Jesus Christ, His Eikons earn eternal brokeness, death, and ultimately separation.
Great on going series, btw…
-jeremy
If my memory serves me right, “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the law of God”.
I like how Jim Keenan, a Jesuit virtue ethicists, describes sin: the failure to bother to love.
Sin is not being the person God created you to be.
Sin is both the cause and effect of our separation from God. There is capital “S” Sin, original sin, that gulf that exists between human beings and God. There are small “s” sins, those acts we commit as a result of this gulf. Too much effort spent on making sure we don’t do the latter makes us forget that such actions are rooted in the former. We exist, alas, separated from God. Thankfully, God reaches across this divide and carries us safely home, no matter how much we wiggle and squirm and demand to be let loose. Sinners in the hands of a loving God.
Sin is anything that separates us from God. It can be attitudes, it can be rules, regulations, conformity or the lack of any of these things. I think we pay for too much attention to little sins and not enough to the big ones. For me the big ones are failing to love the unlovely, forgetting to care for the poor, and rejecting the aliens.
Walking with God is such a fine line and yet there is so much freedom.
I must be listening so carefully to the Holy Spirit to insure that I hear God.
Adam, Another question you might add to your list is “What is Hell?” I’d be real interested in what people think. Just an idea.
Sin is like a terminal cancer that we all have and there’s only one Doctor that can save us from it. Some sins are no brainers, very obvious. There’s others that somehow find their way into our believing and the only way to find out they are sins is to take them to the foot of the throne. Usually when I find out it was sin, if I were really honest, I probably already knew.
Sin literally means to “miss the target” hence Paul say “all have sinned and have come short of the glory of God” Rom 3:23. Therefore, sin is to come short of what God requires of us and as all of us are in the same boat – we all need a Saviour.
Another thought for folks……What if this whole life thing is more about understanding the planner than understanding his plan?
I spend so much time trying to figure out His plan for my life……huh….what a waste…I just need to know Him.
Simple stuff, yet so complex.
kewpzc
ftpr krtm tezol