March 13, 2016
Dr. Thomas J. Pace
Start Here: What is Sin and Why Must It Be Forgiven?
Romans 7:19-24

For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?

You turn on the evening news and they’ll have that “Breaking news” come on. And it’ll say, “There’s been a shooting in southwest Houston!” And you kind of go, “Oh.” It didn’t seem all that shocking to us. What does it mean that we’ve gotten to a place where we’re not even shocked when we turn on the TV and there’s been a shooting? Every once in a while something really breaks through, like someone shoots some children in a school or flies a plane into a building. Then we wake up and think to ourselves, “There’s something wrong in the world around us. Something has gone very wrong.”
The truth is that it can be much closer to home. Friday I was walking the dogs, and the postal carrier had parked his minivan across where the sidewalk where it goes into the street and there’s the wheelchair ramp. I had to walk around his minivan, and I said out loud, “What a jerk to park across the wheelchair ramp.” Then I hear myself, and I think, “How judgmental is that? You don’t even know this guy. Now all of a sudden he’s a jerk because he parked in the wrong spot? Where did that come from?”
Now one seems like it’s very, very close and one is very far off this idea of the world being a mess. But here’s what I’m here to tell you - those two things are connected. So the world is askew because there is something that has gone awry at the core of the human spirit. And it has gone awry not just in those people out there who fly planes into buildings or who shoot people or who do terrible things that show up on the news. It’s not just that something has gone awry with them, but it’s gone awry with us, with you and me. There is something that’s very wrong.
Now in the Christian tradition we have a word for that. We call it sin. Karl Menninger wrote a book not long ago called Whatever Became of Sin? He talked about the church’s failure to remind ourselves that sin is within us, that every one of us struggles with it.
Now the word for sin in Greek is hamartia which means “to miss the mark.” I love the picture that Julie gave us of there being a bullseye, and there is a mark. We’re aiming at that mark but, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” as the Scripture says. Every one of us misses the mark. There is something askew within us.
Now I want to make a distinction here and help us understand how this works. There is a cycle of sin. There are sins with a small “s.” We commit sins. And those sins are acts that we do or don’t do that separate us from God. Then there is Sin with a capital “S.” And that is the state of being separated from God, that we are “in sin.” We are separated from God.
Now there’s a cycle, and here’s the way it works. We commit acts that separate us from God. Let me just be clear. This isn’t like following the rules or breaking the laws. This is relational language. The imagery of the New Testament is relational, a covenant relationship. So these are things that break God’s heart. That’s what these are. So we commit these acts, these sins, then those sins separate us from God. And then because we’re separated from God, because we’re living in a way that is apart from God, we find ourselves sinning all the more, committing other sins and finding ourselves being drawn further away from God. And how will we break this cycle? The words the Scripture uses about sin are interesting. They’re “enslaved” to sin. We are “in bondage” to sin. So there’s this cycle.
Let me give you maybe a more human example. If you’re married and you do something that hurts your spouse, because you do something that hurts your spouse, you find yourself putting distance between you. And then because you’ve put distance between you, you care even less about whether you hurt your spouse or not. So you continue to act in other ways. Then you find yourselves moving further and further apart. How are you going to break that cycle?
Well, just as there is a word for that cycle of becoming separated from God there is a word, a force, a power in the New Testament to break that cycle. And it’s called forgiveness, forgiveness of sin.
I love it that in the Apostles’ Creed, which we said just a moment ago, we did not say, “I believe that the human being is inherently a sinful and wretched creature and only by the grace of God can possibly have any value whatsoever.” You might note that the emphasis is on forgiveness of sin. Yes, we’ve separated from God, but God’s initiative is, “I’m not going to let that cycle continue. I’m going to reach across this chasm, this gap that has grown between us, and I’m going to reestablish that relationship not because you’ve gotten to be a better person, not because you’ve decided that you’re going to stop doing such things. I’m going to reach across that chasm, and I’m going to restore the relationship. I’m going to break the cycle.” That’s what God says. So God is going to forgive.
When God forgives our sin, there are two components to that. One, God forgives the guilt of our sin, and second, God forgives the power of our sin.
Let’s talk about guilt for just a moment. In Christian language the word we use is justification that God restores our relationship with God in the cross and the resurrection. Now there’s all sorts of different language about how that happens. You’ll hear language about sacrifice about Jesus as the “Lamb of God.” You’ll hear what sounds like legal language that has to do with paying a penalty. There’s all different language.
It’s interesting that in the New Testament the words used mostly for forgiveness are two words. One grows out of the word for gift - charis. But the other one aphesis is about a release. It’s a word that’s used to either set someone free of prison that they have been released or to be released from a debt that you have to pay.
Here’s an illustration that has made sense to me. Someone will ask, “How come God just doesn’t forgive us? Why the cross? Why does someone have to die to forgive us? How does that work?” Let’s say that I get mad at you, and I throw a brick through your window. Then I realize what I’ve done. And you don’t want to be mad at me forever so you say to me, “I forgive you. I forgive you for throwing the brick through my window.” That’s great. But someone has to still pay for the window. There’s still a debt there. And you have two choices. You can say, “Pace, you’re going to pay for the window. You’re going to work it off, you’re going to pay for the window.” But the language that’s in the New Testament is of you saying, “I’ll pay for it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll pay for the window. I’ll pay the debt. You’re forgiven. I’ll pay the debt.”
That’s what we say when we talk about the cross. It’s that in our sin there’s a debt that’s incurred. The language of forgiveness in the New Testament is economic language. And in the Lord’s Prayer you prayed a few minutes ago when we say “Forgive us our trespasses,” I’m not sure why we Methodists are wrong. The Greek word that’s used is the word for debts. It’s an economic word, “forgive us our debts,” because there’s this debt that’s incurred. And the cross is God saying to us, “I’ll pay the debt. You don’t have to. You’re forgiven. You’re set free from the guilt of your sin.”
Now the second piece though is that we’re set free from the power of our sin. So Paul says it in the Scripture we read just a minute ago. “Even though I do the very things I despise… How does that happen? Why do I keep doing these very things that I despise?” The Christian word for being freed from the guilt of our sins is justification, the word for being free from the power of our sin is sanctification, and that is a process that goes on for a lifetime. We are being released from the bondage of sin in our lives. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the work of God within us, to set us free from that.
Here’s another sort of imperfect illustration I can use, all of them are just ways to try to give us handles. I was in a Bible study talking about this when a woman there had a comment. She said, “I thought when I became a Christian that all of a sudden I would be free from all these sins that beset me, and I found myself just feeling guiltier about them. I kept waiting for God to come and do God’s thing.” And a man in the group gave what I think was a great illustration. He said that his son would always fight with him about doing his homework. He said, “I would come home every night from work and I knew I’d have to fight with my son about doing the homework. It was me against him. We’d go knock down-drag out… we’d really get it on about homework. And then one day I realized I had the model wrong. I said to him, ‘Son, we’re not going to do it this way anymore. It’s not going to be me against you about the homework. It’s going to be you and me against the homework. We’re going to be a team here and together we’re going to face that homework. I’m going to hold you accountable, and I’m on your team here. I’m not against you, I’m for you.’”
So once that relationship is restored with God, we have a teammate. Paul says, “If God is for us, who can be against us.” It’s as we’re saying, “I will battle with sin with you on my side. And we’re going to deal with it all of our lives. And you are going to win the battle, God. To be freed from the power of our sin.”
That’s what that relationship with Christ does. It doesn’t magically in an instant make our challenges go away. But it says, “Rather than those that separate us we’re going to be on the same side and we’re going to be fighting those together.” That makes a big difference.
Let me share with you one more illustration. I’ve been looking online at these eyeglasses, these readers that are made of this shape saving alloy, these metal alloys. I find them to be so intriguing. I mess up my glasses all the time so I buy them in these big boxes of readers. And then I found these. You take them, and you open them up, and they look just fine. But you can wad them all up and squeeze them and bend them and when you let go of them in theory - I’ve not paid $182 for them yet - they spring back to the way they’re supposed to be. I thought, “How cool is that! That’s what I need! I need some of those.”
I think that’s a picture of what creation is like. So here’s the way creation is made to be. Here’s the way you and I were created to be - we’re formed. And sin takes it and twists it and bends and skews it and does everything it can to get it wrong. How do you get it back? You let it go. Forgiveness is letting it go. Releasing the power over the world so it returns to - the Hebrew word is shalom - to the way it’s supposed to be, the way it was formed. To free the world from the power of sin.
So if in forgiveness we are set free from the guilt of our sin and the power of our sin there’s one more thing I want us to leave with. We are called not just to receive this forgiveness, but we are called to be agents of this forgiveness, ambassadors for this forgiveness. Paul calls it “ambassadors of reconciliation,” to pass this on to the world around us.
In the Gospel of John just after Jesus is resurrected he appears to his disciples, and he breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Then he adds some really dramatic and profound words. He says to the disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. If you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Wow. That’s a lot of responsibility for you and me. He’s saying, “Look, your job is to pass on this forgiveness to the world, to help the world go back to the shape it was intended to be, to pass on that forgiveness. I’m going to give it to you, you’re going to give it to them.”
In the 15th century when the Protestant Reformation began Martin Luther focused on something he called the priesthood of all believers. The idea was that you don’t need a priest to forgive you; you just go right to God. But there’s a second component to that. And that’s that you and I are to be priests to one another. You are to be a priest to the person sitting next to you and offer them God’s forgiveness. That’s your responsibility. James says, “Confess your sins to one another that you might be healed.”
Just a few minutes ago after the prayer of confession we used the traditional liturgy of assurance. I said to you, “In the name of Jesus Christ you are forgiven.” And you said, “In the name of Christ you are forgiven.” Now listen, it doesn’t take just one pastor to forgive maybe five hundred of you. I’ve sinned a lot so it takes 500 of you to forgive me, I guess. That’s not the point. It’s not that I’m forgiving you and you’re forgiving me, it’s that I’m forgiving you and you’re forgiving them. You’re forgiving one another. I wish I could make you stand up and turn around and say it to the world out there, “in the name of Jesus Christ you are forgiven,” because that’s what your job is. That’s what our job is.
When I preach about forgiveness more than anything else the one thing people will ask me is, “Why does it say in the Bible that if I don’t forgive others then God won’t forgive me?” That really bothers people. Because all of us might say, “I’m not very good at this - forgiving others all the time. So does that mean that I’m not forgiven?”
Don’t get the order confused. The order is that God forgives you so that you might forgive others. Here’s another kind of weak, simplistic illustration. If I have $1000 and I give it to Don Eldridge… I see Don sitting there, poor Don! I give it to Don and I say, “Don, here’s $1000 and I want you to give that to the people out there and when you run out of that $1000 come back and I’ll give you some more.” And Don says, “Awesome! Thank you so much.” He receives the gift and he puts it in his pocket. He says, “I’m keeping it, man!” Am I going to give him anymore? Why would he need more? He already has $1000. Why would he need more? Or course he doesn’t need more. I’m not going to give him more because he’s not emptying himself of what I have given him. So the way we open ourselves to receive forgiveness is by passing it on. It’s a force to be given to the world around us, to release the world from the sin that twisted it, and bound it, and shackled it and enslaved it.
I think the most powerful parable of the Christian faith is in Luke 15, the story of the two sons, the prodigal son and the elder son. Today I want us to think about the prodigal. The very first Scripture I ever memorized was from Luke 15. It’s the prodigal son who has wandered off; he’s spent his inheritance on wine, women and song. He’s sitting in the pig sty, and the Scripture says, “When he came to himself…” What a great phrase! “When he came to himself, he said, ‘I shall arise and go to my father, and I shall say to him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” So he goes to see his father, and as he’s walking down the road he’s practicing his speech. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you and am no longer worthy to be called your son.” Then he sees his father, and his father sees him from afar off and runs down the road to greet him. And his father doesn’t say to him, “What have you done? You’ve broken my heart!” Instead he scoops him up in his arms, and he puts a robe on him and a ring on his finger and he throws a party for him.
Friends, God has reached across all the mistakes we’ve made and all the sin, all the separation, the distance we’ve put between us and God and has run down the road to meet us and scoop us up in his arms. And he forgives us. I believe in the forgiveness of sin.
Let’s pray. Lord God, we confess to you that through what we’ve done, what we’ve thought, what we’ve said, what we’ve left undone, our attitudes, our perspectives, our way of life we have separated ourselves from you too often. Forgive us. Reach across the chasm we’ve created, and draw us close to you again. Become our teammate, our partner, as we together work to live in a way that you taught us to live. Give us the strength and insight to share with the world around us the forgiveness that you’ve offered us so that the world might be restored. In the name of Christ. Amen.