Sin Depletes Long Term Happiness

Sin has the tendency to put short term happiness over long term happiness. The nature of sin is that it leaves the sinner empty.

What is offered in the moment is at the expense of the long term joy. God tells us to follow him because his yoke is easy and the burden light.

The commands of God are difficult in the moment. The commands of God also are easy in the long run as the protect us against our tendency to sell out our happiness.

The Disease of Pride

Sin is a sickness in man's soul. When the bible calls us to live according to the will of God the bible calls us to live a life of spiritual and emotional health.

Often the human nature is such that we would rather be right than happy. It is easy to dismiss this as untrue.

The longer we think about it though the more often we could see how we could be or could have been happy in a situation if we were willing do give up on being seen as right in this or that.

The condition of pride eats at the soul. Sin is a disease that makes us unhappy.

We always wish to equate living as we please with happiness. But more often than not when we live as we please we are not happy.

Sin, Want, and Unhappiness

Sin causes a great deal of unhappiness in life. One common example is how sin causes us to be unhappy by wanting things.

It is not that desire for things is wrong, but often we are perfectly happy and then our sinful nature beings to fixate on something we want. Maybe the thing is out of reach or will take a while to obtain.

And now we are unhappy and there is no reason we should be unhappy. Often we are unhappy because we do not experience the good things around us because we are focused on what we feel we lack.

We do not really lack anything. Sometimes we need to have a reality check.

We are not unhappy because we lack, but because we are greedy. Often the greed is a cultural norm, but it is greed none the same.

God wants us to be happy. That is why scripture calls us to be content. True happiness is found ultimately not in material things, but in right relationship to God.

Pleasure Is Not the Enemy

The other day I read a quote that basically said that pleasure must be avoided in order to not sin. Since when is sin and pleasure the same thing? Sin comes in a variety of forms.

The quote might have been trying to say that it's wise to think first about what God wants before making decisions. That is true. We should aim to follow the Bible in what we do. But in no way should we make sweeping statements that make it sound like Christianity is against pleasure.

God wants us to have pleasure. After all he created a world where we find pleasure in looking at the variety of color and beauty in nature and simple things.

Life isn't always pleasurable and surely some wise decisions will be painful in the short term. Following Christ sometimes feels difficult, but it also has its pleasures that include knowing and being loved by him.

The message that we would love to share with non-Christians, and even with each other in forms of encouragement and praise, is the beautiful pleasure of being together in Christ and the knowledge that his commands are good, and there is meaning and purpose in life beyond ourselves.

To be able to show the world the pleasure and freedom we have in Christ, some of us might need to aim to take more pleasure in things.

An Essential Part of Love - The Need for Boundaries

Post by
Michelle Dowell, Co-Contributor

When Jesus tells us to love everyone, that means and includes respect, and one important part of respect is relational boundaries.

Some Christians believe that everyone should share every detail of their life with other Christians. A person who is okay with sharing everything about their life sometimes will pry into another person's life, possibly not realizing that each person has preferences on that and that should be respected.

It could be the over-realized eschatology that has seeped into some popular Christian thinking. If people think that everyone is perfect here and now, then if someone shares some sad part of their life or past that the other people won't judge or be weird about it. But that's the thing. Christians still judge, gossip, and aren't nice about things at times. We are all sinners the Bible says. And it's not until we are in heaven that we aren't sinners.

So it's wise for people to be careful about what they share and who they share it with, even if the person they are considering sharing details with is a Christian. It helps protect from unhelpful and sometimes relationally damaging judgement and gossip from happening.

I've heard someone say that sharing every detail with others helps others and the community realize that life and people are not perfect. They hear not perfect things in other people's life and therefore know that they are okay--bad things happen to everyone. However, there are many other ways to see and know that the world is not perfect. It doesn't have to come through "over-sharing."

We can still trust people and other Christians--it's just that trust should grow over time. Just like trusting people with job responsibilities. You trust them with little, and how they take care of little determines if you can trust them with more. And the nature of time is that we only have time to invest deeply in a small amount of relationships, so we don't have the time to develop deep relationships with everyone. Just because two people are Christians doesn't mean they automatically or will eventually be best friends. Each person is created with unique likes and a unique personality.

Growth and Admitting Flaws

Often in the Christian life our spiritual growth is hindered because we won't admit flaws. We cannot grow in areas if we refuse to admit we need to grow in areas.

The message of the bible is that man is under the curse of sin. The biblical ethic is so high that an honest understanding of its requirements tells us that we constantly fail.

God has grace on us and counts feeble attempts as a keeping of the law through the purifying blood of Jesus. Grace covers all our transgressions. We should not seek to sin because we have grace. If we are truly saved by grace the grace of God that saves us will naturally make us desire to do good works.

Grace which saves comes from our union with Jesus through faith in his death. The same union with Jesus that comes through faith also begins to change us degree by degree to be like Jesus.

It is faith in the cross which saves us and it is also faith in the cross which is the power which pushes us to grow in grace. Often it is easy to think that salvation and sanctification are caused by two different causes. We are saved and now need to figure out how to live.

Of course there is a need to figure out what Christian life entails, but the element behind both is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The link between justification and sanctification is that both events are tied together and driven by the same element faith in the work of Jesus.

Post: Our Way

Growth

Growing in the Christian life requires looking to God. Often people look to grow by looking at sin and then trying to avoid sin.

There is truth in the approach, but studying the problem does not help us as much to the solution as looking at God. If we look to God and learn about God and love God then we will make far more progress in faith than if we look at sin and try to avoid it.

Righteous living is very active in nature. This is also why looking to God is helpful. God is a God who acts.

Jesus' life was filled with righteous activity from start to finish. The need for the Christian to act is at least as important for righteousness as the avoidance of sin.

You see avoiding sin, without an active expression of love is meaningless. The bible says if we have all things, but lack love it is worthless.

Love is something which is active and must be expressed. We can avoid sin sitting in isolation in a room our who lives and the avoidance of sin is worthless without expressing love.

Love is active. We must go out and do. We must risk and be vulnerable. Love is more important for real righteousness than avoidance of sin.

Responsibility of the Highest Degree

Responsibility at its highest level requires us to take responsibility for things which are not our responsibility. If we see this or that wrong or this or that wrong or issue we can fix we take responsibility if it is in our power to do so.

It is obvious we cannot do everything. We are cannot fix every problem but it should not stop us from doing what we can. To have great responsibility in life is to be aware that there are times we may need to act to fix things problems others creating.

Jesus is of course the greatest example of this responsibility. He took responsibility for sin when he himself had no sin.

There are conservative churches which have concern about speaking of Jesus as an example in life. There is some basis for the concern in that Jesus is first our savior and our God and only there after our example.

We cannot see Jesus as our example properly before we understand his nature, life, work, and stature seated at the right hand of God. But Jesus himself commands us to see him as our example, "a new commandment I give you that you love each other as I have loved you."

You see the movement in some conservative churches to avoid speaking of Jesus as an example because it feels risky is unbiblical. You cannot have concern for the teaching of God and then decide that you find the teaching of God too risky to speak of.

I am to a degree overstating my case, but not by much. If you begin to speak of Jesus as an example in many conservative churches you begin to see people cringe.

I believe the conservative church has more correct than the liberal church but at times the conservative church is so concerned with being "conservative" that it plays theology far safer than the Bible does to the extent of ignoring the word of God. Being biblical is to find what the Bible finds important.

Learning and Humility

Learning should be connected with humility. Often learning and humility are not connected.

The reality is the universe is far larger and more complected than individuals can grasp. We all rely on others' expertise everyday. Even experts have more to learn.

Ultimately in any discipline we learn we should realize our limits. It is only our pride, not our learning, that would lead us to any conclusion other than our great limitations when we learn.

If we study science the universe is far larger than we could imagine. Economics has many truly complex problems. In theology we meet the most difficult to grasp thing overall: God.

God is bigger and more complex than we could imagine. Many theologians grasp onto the humility of Jesus. Turning the other cheek and the tenderness in the man. Others grasp onto the activist Jesus who fought against evil in the world.

You see both are correct. In God we find elements which fit beautifully together, but on the surface seem antithetical.

You see as we study God we find that tenderness and severity are compatible. We find many things in God that surprise us.

It is our personhood which is lacking. We are not the complex people we think we are rather we are quite simple because our sin makes us simple.

Love is Not an Absence of Sin

It is very strange in the current day that some theologians have begun to define love as an absence. All discussion around love are what love is not.

It is difficult for these theologians to speak of what love positively is. They can talk for hours about what love is not. They tend to turn positive statements about love in the bible into the converse negatives of what love is not.

The bible gives negative and positive guidance about many things. It is important to keep the tense of the biblical teaching.

It is interesting that theologians who cannot speak positively of love also tend to turn all positive statements in the bible into negative statements which roughly correlate.

You see this is a great error. Christianity is an active religion, not a religion of absence. Love is a presence. It is positive power, not a lack of sin.

We can have a relaxing day at home alone avoiding sin, but we are not positively expressing love. There is nothing wrong with the relaxing day at home, but to be clear we have not expressed love if we sit at home alone for a day with no contact with the world.

Love is active. The bible uses many active statements about love because love is an action. The negative statements of what love is not in the bible clarify what love positively is.

Negative statements of what love is not are not a denial that love is an action. We must be very careful to read what the bible says. It is not scriptural to read what the bible says and then always modify it into a different form.

It is a form of redaction to turn the whole of scripture into a set of negative commandments. The bible is full of positive commands for living. To change the tense of the commands from positive to negative is to redact scripture.

God and Sinful Man

Often today Christian thinkers scoff at the phrase that "God hates sin and loves the sinner." It is too simple.

The reality is that in the current day we make the bible more complex than it is. We cannot understand the bible because we think ourselves out of understanding.

The bible always affirms that God hates sin and stands in opposition to it. It always affirms the eternal realities at stake in life.

And yet the bible always affirms that God takes no pleasure in those who will not repent and wishes to draw all people to himself.

You see many people wish to deny the truth of these points. We often meet two truths clearly stated in scripture and decide which we will pick. You see we say "no" to much of scriptural teaching rather than simply saying "yes" to all of scripture.

We are often stuck in an either/or when we should see God is teaching the reality of a both/and. God's desire to bring all people to himself and his will of an eternal reality based on faith or rejection of Jesus is always affirmed.

Often the issue is that we out think what is so clearly stated. The teaching of scripture is often only hard because we make it so.

Faith as a Way of Life

The church often views faith as something which has happened. When did you come to faith in Jesus?

It is true that faith has a beginning but you see it continues. It has an end listed in the bible when we meet God face to face in heaven.

You see we live life day by day by faith. What does living by faith mean?

You see it is trusting in things we do not see and always clinging the promises of God.

Why is living by faith relevant? Primarily because it makes us humble and open to opportunities. You see we do not know as much as we think.

The tendency of mankind is to always see oneself as someone who knows things and has capabilities. This hinders our mission because we rely on our own strength not on God.

To realize that we do not know and we do not see God but through a glass dimly allows true ministry and a more faithful following of God.

You see we are all pilgrims on a journey and we are all lost and needing direction at times. Some pilgrims on the path of faith are more lost than others and some are mainly on the right path and some very far astray, but we all are on a path and there is murkiness to it and we are not always sure what is right or wrong.

Often ethics and the Christian life is made very simple. You see in the bible that ethics and the Christian life is very difficult.

Usually the disconnect is that we have simplified faith to make it easy to fulfill. We like things that are achievable.

Christianity is inconvenient in that it demands the unachievable, to be sinless, and then simply says look you cannot achieve this. Go have faith in Jesus – he has achieved what you cannot.

The great achievement of the Christian, faith, rests outside of himself. And as he lives out faith the works flow from his connection to Jesus.

The bible has an ethical sense which is terribly difficult. It is impossible to fulfill. But God knows our frame and says have faith I have already fulfilled the whole law for you and go and live in faith.

And as we live in faith we fail but by God’s grace it has no effect on our standing since the cross is final. It is finished. Salvation is won or lost at the cross.

We are free to live out obedience to God while resting in the fact that victory is won. You see the path we journey on is fully under the shadow of the cross where all of our sin has been blotted out and we are already clothed in Jesus’ righteousness.

We can have the freedom to fail because the battle is won and the freedom is liberating because we are asked to live in faith and what is requested is that we live in faith and not that we have any success.

You see success in many aspects of life is given by God. It is not a result of the quality of faith. That we fail often has no relation to the quality of our faith or efforts and more on God’s will.

And you can see that there is often no relation between the success God gives and how he views his children. He may give one child great success and another very little, but it often has no bearing on his view of them.

Many wicked man have been given by God a short ephemeral success and many children a long and hard path, but you see we need to look by faith at things and not judge as the world judges.

What We Need vs. What We Want

Needs and wants are mixed together and often indistinguishable by the human mind.

As a grad out of college I worked on a small temporary project along with a man who had worked for many years making $100,000 per year before losing his job in layoffs. The man in his sixties said that he never had children because he did not believe he could raise a family on $100,000 per year.

The point is not what income is needed to comfortably raise a family, but a confusion of needs and wants. It became clear in my discussion with the man that often he could not distinguish between the two.

It is the human condition which blinds us to reality many times. Sin has an affect on human thinking. It clouds our rationality.

Often the affect of sin on the human mind is dismissed. Many great minds are not Christians and many poor minds are Christians.

The affect of sin on the human mind is not so much on rationality such as math and logic, but on moral issues.

At times moral issues are heavily related to financial decisions. Some financial problems are moral ones at their core.

Not all sin affects all people equally but sin can often manifest in the blurring between needs and wants. Sometimes the blurring can cause the sinful mind to accumulate great wealth ignoring what it is doing in the world.

It is not always the blurring which leads to poor financial decisions, but also sometimes the blurring which leads to good financial decisions at any cost.

God as Complete

The Christian faith insists that God is complete. God has nothing he needs of man.

We often live and act as if God has something he needs from us. You see we are very foolish to feel that in some sense we have something which God needs.

The reality is that God does not need us. But he loves us anyway.

You see there is a great freedom knowing that God does not need us but loves us unconditionally. There is no danger that he is using us.

He knows us in our fallen state that we have nothing to offer him and our lives grieve him but he loves us anyway.

You see God is not like mankind. Man often forms and leaves relationships depending on if they make sense.

God says "yes" to all who wish to have a relationship regardless of the sensibility of the relationships. You see of course that no relationship that God enters makes sense to him ultimately.

There is often discussion of the various covenants that God has entered with man. Some are more one sided than others. But you see this often misses the point that no covenant God has entered with man made sense entirely the mindset of benefit to God.

"This is love that while we were still sinners Christ died for us." You see God always transcends in love to meet men in their state at a cost to himself.

Acceptance

In life it is hard at times to be accepted. We feel there are many communities which will not accept us.

There are many strings to acceptance at times. Sometimes we are accepted and through no fault of our own we are no longer accepted.

Sometimes we are accepted but leave the acceptance of others because we realize there is a moral or emotional cost to this.

The good news of life is that God is always a God of acceptance. I suppose there are strings attached here too.

It is called faith. If we have faith that Jesus is who he says he is we are accepted into the family of God?

Is it too easy? Yes and no. In principle it is far too easy. But this is the problem.

It offends our pride that the solution is so easy. It would in fact be somewhat easier if we were allowed to contribute something to our acceptance.

We have to work for human acceptance. This is not pleasant but at least a little work makes us feel we have earned our acceptance.

The reality is we do not earn our acceptance before God our acceptance before God is unconditional and free.

Something is difficult about this. The difficulty is our sin nature wishes to have a high view of ourselves.

There is nothing we can do and nothing we can provide. It is strangely unpleasant how easy it is.

That is the difficulty because the easiness of faith and the difficulty of accepting it points the reality of the all-encompassing sin nature.

We are who the bible says we are if we like it or not. Our nature is as the bible describes.

Mankind wishes to say that it is generally good. The evidence of history and sociology do not verify this perspective in any culture at any time.

The problem really is as the bible says. Man has a bad heart and needs a good heart by faith in Jesus.

Honesty in Theology

Honesty is an important part of theology. What I mean is theology needs to match reality.

You see many preachers and theologians concerned with holy living over simplify sin out of a great concern for loose living. They understand grace but are afraid and like to focus on works.

At times you will see them squirm in a small group setting when people are honest of their struggles in faith. You see they are concerned by the reality of life and wish for people to live well and often it is easy to reject the reality.

The reality of sin is that it is not ideal and holiness is something to strive for. But trying to hide the reality of the human condition and act as if the sinful thoughts of people are abnormal is not helpful.

You see we must start by first accepting the problem. That is why the admission of sin is necessary for faith. We can't accept grace if we don't believe we need it. .

The same thing is true with sanctification. We can't grow if we don't know what we need to grow from.

This is why many people who feel very holy tend to be the least holy. You see they have no idea of their sinful tendencies and thus have little idea of where they need to grow.

Often those aware of their sin are making progress on it. God can use the knowledge of their sin to help improve them. It is always difficult to fix what we do not believe is broken and that is why accepting the reality of human life is important.

Not Worthy

A lot of people in the world say they are "not worthy" of God's grace or forgiveness. I suppose that is the point. They are not worthy but God wishes to forgive them anyway.

You see God is a God who wishes to forgive. He already knows you are not worthy.

He knows who you are and what you have done and wishes to forgive. You see and meet many people in the bible who do not understand why people are forgiven.

Jonah does not understand why the Ninevehites are forgiven. Why are so many sinners forgiven by Jesus? Surely he should not forgive these terrible people.

You see the point is God forgives who he wishes. And he wishes to forgive all that want forgiveness. He will not turn any away who knock at his door.

There is more grace in God than there is sin in you.

The Past

It is common for people to look to the past as better than today. They feel that in the past people behaved better and were more civil and more Christian.

You see we often see the problems of our day but fail to see the problems of other days. It is not as if past ages don't have problems. Their problems are simply different than ours.

You see it is very common to miss remember the past. Or to glorify the good times which were not so glorious.

As our memories of things fade we often forget many of the hard things about the past and remember the good. It is not always the case.

If you look at politics, history, our past, and even theological history you see a trend where the past often gets placed in a rosier light than it was.

Nothing is new under the sun. Mankind is mankind under sin in every age.

He expresses his sin similarly in each age with particular vices he favors. But man is the same. He is born with a bad heart in every age.

It is only when he looks to Jesus in faith that his heart of stone is turned to a heart of flesh.

The Radical Nature of Christianity

The church at the current time has lost the radical nature of Christianity. I once spoke to a sincere person who said that he was almost completely sanctified.

I am sure this person’s faith is quite sincere but it is really a loss of the law of God. His will is we are perfect as he is perfect.

If we think we are nearly perfect we are in denial about the nature of man. Paul called himself the chief of sinners. You see modern theologians wish to be clever and turn this into Paul's pre-Christian self.

Let us give them that even though they are wrong. Now we must deal with the teachings of the bible which are very clear such as 1 John 1:8-10:

"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 is not in us."

Really it is folly to say we are without sin. You see the need to say we are without sin is also irrelevant. We should desire to live rightly but there is more grace in God than sin in us.

You see the grace of God is infinite and we need simply to rest in grace. Resting in grace enables following the law rather than hindering it.

I recently wrote a post on my older blog on a Christian's value before God: A Christians Value Before God

To be Right

As people we have an insatiable desire to be right. We are often desire to be right or have our way even at great cost to ourselves.

I think a line from a 70s song songs up a proper spirit a Christian should have: "if loving you is wrong i don't wanna be right."

Obviously the whole message of the song is a against Christian values, but the idea that we should not care about being right is interesting. We should care about being truly right but not about being right in the moment or in the past.

It is always the human tendency to self justify ourselves and need for our actions to be right and have been right. This is often why problems in human society get worse. We all fail but we do not like to admit it and often the problems get worse because of our failure to admit failure.

We often need to back track to the truth. Always the phrase back track in our society is used negatively.

I wonder why? We are often of course in life and the only logical idea is to move back to the trail. If Christianity is a path and we wonder then we should go back to the path.

I suppose the idea is that we shouldn't in a good sense back track because we should never in a bad sense leave the trail. This idea has a false rosy view of human nature and a lack of perspective of the fog of life and the ease of sin.

We will fail and will be wrong and then it is right to admit we are wrong.