Talking of Sin
t first I thought I call this ‘looking afresh at sin’, but like ‘Fresh
Expressions’ it sounded like an invitation to something positive. I just
wanted to remind ourselves that in the Lord’s Prayer we are asking
“forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. We had a
neighbour in Cumbria, an old clergyman who maintained that nobody can sin
against us, sin was something only between God and man, and actually
there only was one ‘sin’, not sins that keeps us away from God. In the Old
Testament there were two forms of that sin: blasphemy and idolatry, while 1
John 2, 16 speaks of the ‘love of the world’ the ‘cravings of sinful man, the
lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does’, as meaning a
turning away from God.
A
Sin has long been falsely personalised. It is usually seen as connected to
sexuality, unmarried couples were ‘living in sin’, but this interpretation does
not take into account the idea of a general sinfulness of mankind in the sight
of God that Jesus came to redeem. But that in turn could mean that
personally we aren’t responsible for our decisions. Yet sin and guilt are
somehow connected to human dignity, they te