As we think about God and who God is
and how God does the things God does, one of the subject that comes to our mind
is sin. So today, as we continue our sermon series “Theology 101”, we’re going
to talk about sin.
God created the world. God
created everything in the world, including you and me. And God, as we
know, is perfect. And yet, the perfect God created all these imperfect
people. All these people who do things they know they should not do.
All these sinful people.
Why is that? I mean, it seems
like kind of shoddy workmanship, when you think about it. A perfect God
should be able to create perfect people, right? And presumably, God
could’ve done that, if God had chosen to. And yet, God did not do that.
God did not create perfect people. Instead, God created flawed,
weak, selfish, stubborn people. People like you. And, of course,
people like me.
And it’s been like that from the
beginning. People have been sinful from the beginning of time.
That’s one of the points of the story of Adam and Eve. Think about
this. God gave Adam and Eve everything they could possibly want.
They could go anywhere they wanted to go. They could do anything
they wanted to do. They could have anything they wanted to have.
There was just one thing God told them not to do. God said you can
have all the best stuff that’s ever been on earth, but just do one thing for
me. See that one tree over there? Don’t eat the fruit from that
tree. You can eat anything else you want. You can eat the fruit
from every other tree on earth. Just leave that one tree alone, okay?
And so, of course, what did Adam and
Eve do? They went right to that tree and started eating. They had
some “help”, of course, some prompting from the serpent, but still, they knew
what they were doing. They knew God had told them not to eat the fruit
from that tree, and they knew they were eating that fruit. They
deliberately did what God had told them not to do.
And that’s pretty much what we do,
too, right? We do it all the time. I know I do. We constantly
do things that God has told us not to do, and we constantly fail to do things
God told us to do.
And I’m not just talking about
legalisms here. I’m not just talking about all the “thou shalt nots” that
the Bible has. I’m not discounting them, either, but what I keep coming
back to, whenever we talk about something like this, is what Jesus said were
the two greatest commandments of all. And what are they? We’ve
talked about them many times before. Love the Lord your God, and love
your neighbor as yourself. Love God and love the other people God
created. Jesus said those are the two greatest commandments. Jesus
said that all of the law and everything that the prophets ever said comes from
those two commandments.
So any time we don’t do that, we
sin. Any time we don’t love God, we sin. Any time we don’t love
other people, we sin. So for most of us, that means we sin several times
a day. Sometimes several times an hour. Any time we do something,
or say something, or just feel something that is unloving toward God or
unloving toward someone else, we sin.
That’s true no matter how much we
wish it was not. And it’s true no matter how hard we try to make it not
true. We should try to make it not true, but we know we’re going to fail.
Even the Apostle Paul could not do it. He wrote in the letter to
the Romans, “I do not understand what I do. For
what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” No matter how hard
we try to get sin out of our lives, we can never do it.
And I come
back to my question, why is that? If God could’ve chosen to create
perfect people, why did God not do that? Why did the perfect God, with
the ability to create people in any way God chose, choose to create--us?
Well, we
don’t know, obviously. None of us can read the mind of God. We
assume that if God did it, it must be right. It must be the best way.
But still, we wonder. Why would God, who has unlimited power and
unlimited ability and could have chosen to create humans any way we can
imagine, and probably ways that we cannot imagine, have chosen to create us the
way we are?
Well, think
about this. We are told that we should love God and love each other,
right? If we were made in such a way that we could not help but
love God, would that really be love? It seems to me that love, for it to
really be love, involves choice. It involves having options and making a
decision. If there’s no choice, if there’s no decision to be made, then
we’re just doing what we have to do. That’s not love. It may be
duty, it may be obligation, but it’s not love. Love has to be voluntary.
It has to involve having options and making a choice. We have to
choose to love for it to really be love.
And of
course, for us to be able to choose to love, we also have to be able to choose
not to love. The choice of not loving, of not thinking, speaking, or
acting in loving ways has to be there. So I think that’s part of the
reason God created us the way we are. That’s part of the reason God
allows sin to exist. Because without the possibility of sin, there could
not be the possibility of love.
And then, too, consider this: God may not
be finished with us yet. The way people are now may not be the way people
are going to stay. God is still working with us. God is still
working on us. God is still working in us to make us better, to make us
God’s people, to make us the people God wants us to be.
It takes a
long time with us flawed, weak, selfish, stubborn people. We don’t change
easily. And again, God does not force us to change, because God gives us
the choice. But God keeps working with us and on us and in us, and we do
change. We are better. For example, in most parts of the world, we
don’t have slaves any more. There are still some places that do, sadly,
but most don’t. In most parts of the world, we don’t treat women as
property any more. Again, there are sadly still some places that do, but
most don’t. Humanity is improving. We are getting better.
We’re still
a really long way from where God wants us to be, of course. And we don’t
know how much time God may give us. I don’t know that there’ll ever be a
time when we completely conquer sin. But we can get better. And we
do get better.
So what’s
the point? How can all this talk about sin help us? Well, here’s
the point. Our life on this earth is about choices. Everything we
say and everything we do is about choices. That’s how God set it up for
us. We choose to do some things. We choose not to do other things.
We do that every single day.
What that
means is that every single day, we have choices to make. We can choose to
sin. Or, we can choose to love. That’s the choice we make every
day. In fact, we make that choice many, many times over the course of a
day. Every time we say something or don’t say something, every time we do
something or don’t do something, we are making that choice. We either
choose to sin or we choose to love.
But what
that also means is that every single day, we get another chance. No
matter how many times we sinned yesterday, we can choose to love today.
In fact, it’s better than that. If we chose to sin an hour ago, we
choose to love this hour. If we chose to sin ten minutes ago, we can
choose to love in the ten minutes to come. No matter how many times we’ve
chosen to sin, and no matter how recently we chose to sin, we can now choose to
love. We can do that any time we want to. In fact, we can do it
right now. We can choose right now, in this instant, to love instead of
sin. We can love God and we can love the people God created right now, no
matter what we’ve done before.
God could
have required our obedience, but God did not do that. God decided,
instead, to let us choose. So let’s choose wisely. Let’s
choose to love.
No comments:
Post a Comment