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What Is Sin? A Foolish Rebellion Against God

What Is Sin? A Foolish Rebellion Against God

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Reading time: 4 minutes

Your understanding of sin can have a profound effect on your life. If your definition is inaccurate, you will be either too judgmental or too lenient with yourself and others. What is sin? What is the best way to understand sin? Is sinning different that sin?

Sin is Rooted in a Sinful Nature

What is a sinful nature? It is the condition of our existence that we are born into. It cannot be escaped by any effort apart from God.

A sinful nature is a core (primary) attitude in the heart: a desire to live your own life, with your own rules, apart from God. Instead of acknowledging and choosing dependence upon God, sin is rebellion against God and what He stands for. Rebellion can be open and demonstrative or silent but seething below the surface.

Those who desire to live apart from God will get what they wish for. Hell is a place absent of God’s goodness, with no hope of escape.

Sin is Different than Sinning

Sin is the disease of the heart. None of us are born ready to choose God wholeheartedly.

We are powerless to separate our sinful nature from our physical bodies. Everyone (except Jesus, Elijah, and Enoch) will die physically because of their sin. Jesus died, but not because of His sin. Elijah and Enoch were sinful like the rest of us, but God took them to heaven before they died. The point is that sin is fatal.

Sin is ongoing but sinning (committing a sin) is a distinct moment in time. Sinning is trivial compared to sin. Sin is more like an incurable disease and sinning is like a natural symptom of the disease. Ceasing sinning does not eliminate sin. But the person who is cured of the disease by faith in Jesus will eventually stop sinning.

We know that our old sinful selves were crucified with Christ so that sin might lose its power in our lives. We are no longer slaves to sin. For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin.

Romans 6:6-7 NLT

Sinning is an action. Sinning is essentially involuntary for non-believers. Because Christ defeated sin and death, sinning is a choice for believers.

Believers are Saints, Not Sinners

A non-believer is a “sinner.” A believer is a “saint.” A sinner will continue sinning. A saint will sin, but not continue in the same defiant way over time. God gives saints the ability to repent.

John Piper answers the question, What is Sin? on his website. He does an excellent job explaining and supporting the idea that no one is good except God. We all fall short, therefore, none of us are capable of good works (apart from God working in us).

For as good of a job he does providing the needed support to answer the question, I am disappointed with his final, concise definition:

Sinning is any feeling or thought or speech or action that comes from a heart that does not treasure God over all other things.

John Piper

As a counselor, I see this definition as confusing at best or containing errors at worst. The definition is complicated and susceptible to misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Here are some questions it raises for me:

  • What about a heart that does treasure God? A saint will treasure God. But a saint is still capable of sinning.
  • Sinning is different than sin. How does this answer the question, what is sin?
  • Feelings and thoughts, and even speech and actions can be indicators of a sinful heart. They are like the smoke resulting from a raging fire.
  • Feelings and thoughts can be involuntary. They just happen. God judges sin and condemns it. Should a definition of sin focus on condemning feelings? When people burst into tears or express they are afraid, do they need to know first and foremost that they are sinning? Negative feelings can indicate wrong belief about God (needs correction), but they don’t necessarily mean unbelief (sinful).

A better definition will focus on the heart, the core, the root of the problem. I propose a simpler, direct definition: Sin is brokenness producing an attitude of foolish rebellion against God and what He stands for.

The saint practices learning how to stop sinning. The saint values God’s truth. The saint sees dependence upon God as the only way life can possibly work. There can be only one true Kingdom — God’s. Attempting to set up one’s own kingdom apart from God is nothing less than sinful insurrection.

Read more about Elijah and Enoch
Read more about Unbelief
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4 Steps To A Confident Identity

4 Steps To A Confident Identity

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Confidence can be elusive but your identity is the key to finding it. Overshoot and you become proud or arrogant. Undershoot and you carry a heavy burden of discouragement. It’s possible to be confident and humble at the same time. It all depends on how you orient your life: where you find your identity.

Becoming confident takes time. You can develop it as you experience life when considering God as your audience of one. You can become your ideal self–the best version of you that you are pleased with.

Your ideal self is precisely who God means for you to be. You can’t know your ideal self instantaneously. Your identity is God’s greatest gift to you only if you open it up and discover who you are.

I love the following quote, which I first discovered through Darlene Harris while planning an article for her site, andherestorethmysoulproject.org.

Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.

St. Catherine of Siena

This means you have a significant destiny to fulfill by being your ideal self. If you knew who God meant for you to be you wouldn’t want to be anyone else.

To become your ideal self you must journey through four developmental stages. Each stage has a primary focus: caregiver, creation, crisis, and finally Christ. Before you can reach your full potential in one stage, you must complete the challenge of the previous stage. You can work on multiple stages at a time, but incomplete work limits your progress.

1. Caregiver-Focused Identity

You start life dependent on your primary caregivers. You don’t have anything to contribute to others. Your only real job is to learn how to receive from others. Can you receive from others without becoming unnecessarily dependent on them? You can receive and grow at the same time. You receive so you can grow.

2. Creation-Focused Identity

You develop competency and skill by interacting with the external world. At first, you learn to crawl, walk, and run. You learn who you are based on who you connect with the world beyond your body. If you do this well, you contribute to others through the work of your hands. If you don’t, you can become dependent on creation, instead of your creator, to sustain a positive outlook on life.

3. Crisis-Focused Identity

At some point in your life, you face a crisis. A crisis tests your internalized growth or identity. It forces you to clarify your worldview and specifically your Godview. Will you choose to:

  1. Avoid God and return to creation to meet your needs?
  2. Attempt to move Against God and redefine creation to meet your needs?
  3. Ally with God and learn how to let God meet your needs?

If you reject God in some way (option 1 or 2), you’ll likely choose some other ally to depend on (creation or caregivers) as if they were God. You’re vulnerable to developing an addiction because you remain crisis focused instead of Christ-focused. You struggle to accept a good God in a world where you’ve experienced evil.

4. Christ-Focused Identity

You can become a Christian at any of the four steps along the way to identity maturity. However, if you’re not a Christian by the time you reach stage three, the process of resolving your crisis by allying with God and becoming a Christian allows you to enter stage four.

In this final state, you’re sold out on becoming exactly who God made you to be. You desire to align yourself with God’s reality, not a reality you make up. You’re determined to remove any false ideas concerning who you are.

Can you feel the burning in your heart to become all that God made you to be? Are you stuck at any stage in particular? God has all His resources ready to help you become who He made you to be. Then you can set the world on fire. The material in this post comes from my book To Identity and Beyond.

Read more about identity.
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Blame And Defensiveness Exposed

Blame And Defensiveness Exposed

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Who do you blame for life’s problems? How easy is it to identify the source of a problem? What do you blame? When? Why? How often? You might accuse others or you might condemn yourself of some wrongdoing.

Blaming shifts the focus of responsibility. While this tactic might be used for good purposes, I am writing about blame when it is activated for purely selfish purposes.

Blame is Possible Because of a Standard of Behavior

In order to accuse someone of wrongdoing, there must first be some standard in mind, otherwise, the complaint makes no sense. But a blaming statement is meant to carry the weight of authority behind it.

  1. You cut me off in traffic.
  2. You punched me in the face.
  3. You called me names to denounce my worth.
  4. You took the last cookie.
  5. You went to bed without saying goodnight.
  6. You spend too much time with your friends, your computer, your work, your family.
  7. You don’t want to understand me.

What do all of these have in common? They speak of an expectation for behavior, for someone else’s behavior. They could be statements of fact, but they could also be spoken with an edge of condemnation.

We desire to be treated in a way that meets our emotional needs. We also desire to be capable of treating others well. But others fall short and so do we. How well do you love? How badly do you want to love well? What does it mean to you when others love you well?

Blame can be an attack and so blame-shifting is a natural counter-attack. Consider these responses to the above accusations:

  1. You drive too slowly.
  2. You provoked me by continuing to nag.
  3. You don’t understand what I’ve been through.
  4. You never claimed it for your own.
  5. I was too tired to think.
  6. You’re trying to control me.
  7. You’re impossible to understand.

As you can see, the argument is not over whether a standard even exists. It is over the extenuating circumstances, the technicalities of its fulfillment. No one is eager to admit failing to meet the standard. No one wants to feel inadequate to meet the standard.

Blame is Possible Because We Have a Choice

God has standards or laws for many aspects of His creation. Gravity is a law or standard of expected behavior. When a ball is dropped, it falls to the ground. The ball doesn’t have a choice. Gravity would act upon the ball even if the ball could desire to remain suspended in the air.

What about the standards that God has for us? The Bible speaks of the law.

Why, then, was the law given? It was given alongside the promise to show people their sins.

Let me put it another way. The law was our guardian until Christ came; it protected us until we could be made right with God through faith. And now that the way of faith has come, we no longer need the law as our guardian.

Galatians 3:19a,24,25

We no longer need the law as a guardian because we have God Himself as our example of love and our teacher of love. The standard causes us to depend on God to meet the standard. We have the option to sin. We can act against God’s Spirit. We can deviate from His law of behavior.

Unlike the law of gravity that acts upon us involuntarily, God does not forcefully ensure that we love when we don’t want to, or can’t. The law acts upon us from the outside, but God acts from the inside with our cooperation.

When we are faced with our inadequacy to fulfill the law, the natural, sinful response is to minimize the law. My inability to meet your expectations is not my fault. Your standards are too high. You sabotaged my ability to meet them. It’s your fault. You are to blame. The defensive response can seem involuntary because it can come so quickly.

Because we cannot escape from God’s standard, we have only these options to manage God’s standard:

  1. Ignore it (pretend it doesn’t exist).
  2. Downplay it (it exists, but can’t possibly be taken seriously).
  3. Admit falling short but stubbornly hold to independence, living with condemnation (refusing God’s help through Jesus).
  4. Admit falling short but fully depend on God’s help to meet the standard.

The first three will illicit some form of blaming. But when we depend upon God, we no longer have a need for blaming or defensiveness.

Read more about resolving conflict.
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You Are Wonderfully Limited

You Are Wonderfully Limited

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Most people think of being limited as a negative, but not God. Another way of saying you are limited is you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Your limits are restrictive but they also highlight your unique gifting. Others have what you don’t and you have what others don’t.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.

Psalm 139:14 NIV

God Made You Limited

You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of who God made you to be. God has already done the hard work of creating you exactly as He wants you to be. You need to discover who you are, not create who you want to be. The mapping of your DNA determines how your body will grow. Likewise, the mapping of your identity (God’s design for you) determines your personality. Your purpose flows out of your identity.

To be human and have a personality is to be limited. As a believer, trying to be someone you are not is exhausting and ultimately impossible. You don’t have to make up who you are or wonder if you are inferior. Unhealthy comparison means believing you’re not good enough and you should be like someone else. Healthy comparison allows you to see how you’re different and value the differences. Uniqueness creates value.

Being limited simply means you have definition. If you weren’t limited, you’d be God. You’d have every ability God has. But even God is limited. He can’t be evil. Limited doesn’t have to mean incapable or impotent; it can mean intentional focus.

You Have a Purpose Just Like Jesus

Jesus’s primary identity and purpose is to reveal who God is. Jesus is human; He has a personality. Jesus is also God and when we see Jesus, we see all that God is, too (John 14:9).

Jesus prioritized the time He had on earth. For example, because Jesus is also God, He could express perfect athletic ability. He could have come to earth to be a pro athlete, but He didn’t because that’s not His purpose.

By becoming a person and following God’s will, Jesus limited himself in many ways so He could remain focused on completing His mission. To limit attention is to focus. Jesus limited His ministry to what God purposed for Him. He didn’t try to be everything to everybody; He stayed focused on His purpose. Following are several scriptures that define Jesus’s focus.

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.

John 5:19 ESV

Jesus answered, “For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”

John 18:37 NIV

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
    and recovering of sight to the blind,
    to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:17-19 ESV

Knowing Your Limits Helps You Know God’s Will

If you can accept your limits, they will lead you to your unique gifts. What you can’t do highlights all the more what you can do. You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of exactly who God made you to be. Jesus has His purpose and you have yours. Focusing on who God made you to be maximizes your potential. You’ll fulfill God’s will.

Read more about identity.
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Your Past Is The Secret To Your Faith

Your Past Is The Secret To Your Faith

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Focusing on your past can help you trust God with your future. Many people discount the past. They say things like:

  • “It’s already done.”
  • “I can’t change the past.”
  • “Dwelling on the past is a waste of time.”

Faith is normally thought of as forward-looking. Faith involves trusting during times of uncertainty. Do you know what is going to happen next in your life? The future might be more uncertain than the past, but the past can also instill doubt. Therefore, the past is as much alive as the future but in its own way.

Faith is Required for The Future

The future is mostly hidden and unknown. Even though the Bible is clear about the ultimate future of all believers (in heaven), no one knows for sure when that will happen. Only God fully knows the past and the future because only He is in complete control.

Remember the things I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me. Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.

Isaiah 46:9-10 NLT

These verses address the past (remember it), the future (God knows it), and sovereignty (God can do whatever He wants). These two verses, then, are sufficient reasons to trust God, or at least to fear Him. So, we have no choice really. We must trust God with the future. But what about the past?

Faith is Required for the Past

If the past is a done deal, why would trust be necessary at all? Consider this: Which has more influence over your present behavior, the past or the future?

The past provides much stronger clues about your identity, the identity of the world, and even God. The past is alive because you are alive. You can remember experiences, draw from their reality, and make decisions in the present. If you have been through an overwhelmingly (or any) negative (or positive) event, it is still likely influencing your understanding of the world and ultimately your behavior.

One can make an argument that we also need to trust God with the past. Experience can remain as unreconciled mysteries. You can be certain that an event has taken place, but what about the meaning of the event? Can you be certain you understand historical events?

The past is fully visible and fully known to you, but does it make any sense? It certainly raises many challenging questions such as:

  • Why did such and such happen? What is the purpose of it?
  • Why does God allow so many bad things to happen?
  • What can I learn from it? How is it relevant to me?

Your Testimony is Your Past

How has God been working in your life? What is He doing? What has He brought you through? When you can look back and feel confidence rather than doubt, something powerful has happened.

These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

1 Peter 1:7 NLT

God wants you to focus on the past, so you can remember who He is. This can fuel your faith in Him, allowing you to make faithful decisions in the present. The future might remain elusive, but based on your experiences you can let God worry about the future.

The longer you have lived, the more past you will have to go on, and the less future to worry about. That’s not to say anyone should wish they were older, but to enjoy the present because we are making memories today that will benefit us later.

More about Faith.
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3 Steps To Overcoming Shame

3 Steps To Overcoming Shame

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Shame is the inability to tolerate being known. There is no end to being known. Every day is new. Every day brings more ways you can know and be known. This can be threatening to the person who feels shame intensely.

Shame results from becoming confused about the truth after lies are introduced into your mind. The lies provide an alternative to the truth and therefore an alternative to trusting God.

People who feel shame will instinctively hide: from themselves, from others, and from God. This is exactly what Adam and Eve did after they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They acquired a sense of their inadequacy because they could no longer believe God.

“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.”

The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it. Then she gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it, too. At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness. So they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees.

Genesis 3:4-8 NLT

The opposite of hiding in shame is being authentic. Here are three practical ways to reverse the effects of shame.

Know Yourself to Overcome Shame

Before you can share yourself with others, you must first be willing to know yourself.

Being willing to be known is a discipline. Sometimes the cost of being known isn’t worth the reward. Hiding seems better than facing the humiliation of being known. There are times when you won’t be ready for the exposure. That’s okay for the moment.

However, the more you hide, the more you remain hidden even from yourself. It’s not that you’ve forgotten who you are, but more like you’ve never given yourself a chance to understand who you are.

But hiding in shame isn’t really an option for the Christian. God won’t let you hide forever. You are salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). He calls each of us out of hiding and into a relationship with Him, others, and ourselves.

The more you know the truth about yourself, the more you’ll know how you can contribute to others. You don’t always have to receive; eventually, you’ll know what you can give.

Study and Journal to Overcome Shame

If you struggle to tolerate being known, keeping a private journal is the least risky way to begin. Make time to write consistently. As you journal and reread your writing, you begin to see yourself from an outside perspective.

What should you write about? Read the Bible and other helpful materials that teach you who you are. Then write about what the truths stir up in your heart.

Share Yourself with Others to Overcome Shame

Choose a trusted person and begin to share verbally. Practice putting into words what you’re feeling inside, entrusting your private life to another. Receive their acceptance and care.

Remember that God is a person too. Pay attention to how He speaks to you whether directly or indirectly through others.

Share publically, but discriminantly. Share more with everyone you know. This doesn’t mean being an open book to everyone. Healthy people discriminate how much they share with each person. However, as you heal, you should be able to share more freely with more people.

Share Yourself with God to Overcome Shame

Some parts of ourselves only God knows. Can you completely put your inner feelings of shame into clear words for others to understand? Maybe. Can you receive the truth of who you are completely through words alone? Unlikely.

As you grow in being genuine with others, you grow in readiness to receive healing from God. His acceptance is the only true antidote to shame. He can address your shame at the core through a deeply spiritual, relational transaction. Essentially, God reveals who He is to you in order to cure your shame.

Shame is difficult to overcome. It’s easy to fear the unknown. And it’s ten times harder when that unknown is you.

Where are you on your journey to overcoming shame?

Read more about Journaling
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