Here comes an older woman, who clears her throat loudly. “Excuse me, you are sitting in MY pew!”
And, depending upon the story, they either leave the church right then and there, or they all move to the row behind them, the kids are tortured because Mom knows that the woman will be listening to every whisper, and so they leave at the end of the service, never to return because church is so difficult with young children.
Genesis 2:8-9, 15-17, 3:1-6; I Timothy 1:12-17; Matthew 6:9-15
Why do Christians act like the older woman? Why is it that almost everyone can tell this story from personal experience or the experience of a friend or family member?
There is another, similar story. The family attends a church for several months or years. Then one day, an established older member of the church makes fun of a child, complains about the cut of the woman’s dress, insults the husband, or doesn’t make a phone call to the family when they miss three weeks in a row because of sickness. And the family leaves the church, never to return.
A third story. One Saturday, you are riding with your atheist brother-in-law, the man who never has anything good to say about Christians. He has finally started to listen to you about God and are deep in conversation with him. You’ve just about got him committed to coming to church, stopped at a traffic light, when the guy behind you begins honking his horn loudly and yelling. You look up to discover that the light has turned green while your brother-in-law and you have been talking. The guy behind shoots his SUV around the car as your brother-in-law begins to drive forward, and the man flips your brother-in-law the middle finger. As the jerk pulls back in front, you and your brother-in-law see a huge Christian fish symbol on the rear bumper of the SUV. Your brother-in-law declines the invitation to church – can you imagine why?
Why do church-going Christians continue to sin? Why do Christians act like jerks? Why do Christians continue to hurt other people?
The George Barna organization conducts regular polls of Christians and non-Christians about religious and church-related topics. Over the years, many responses have changed, but there is one thing that hasn’t changed…while Jesus is admired by almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian, those same people have a low and declining opinion of Christians and the church. People love Jesus, but despise Christians. Do you have any idea why that would be so?
Well, naturally, the reason is that supposedly holy Christians continue to sin, to act in unholy ways. And it almost seems like we become more vicious the older we get. In fact, I can see it happen in the church.
A teenager or young adult, recognizing the evil in their heart, makes a commitment to Jesus and is baptized. For the first six months or so, he or she still has a problem with their language, with their bad habits, with their attitudes. Do you really expect someone new to the faith to have learned to control their tongue? After all, controlling our tongues is so EASY for us, isn’t it? And so we pastors often tell people – our churches are filled with people who are still learning what it means to be a Christian.
But anyone watching a new Christian sees them working hard on those bad habits, gradually walking down the path of holiness, changing, changing for the better. After about six months, they may backslide a bit, but generally speaking, they will continue a slow improvement for about five years.
Somewhere around that five year stage, they level off, like an airplane that has reached cruising altitude, and if they are like most people, they will stay about the same until they’ve been attending church about twenty years. Somewhere around that time, they will become very involved in the church in some leadership role – they lead a Sunday school class, they become a trustee, their husband or wife is a trustee, they organize funeral dinners, etc. And it is then that the rot most commonly hits them.
They now believe that they are essentially sinless Christian leaders who have practiced so well that staying holy is easy. In fact, they are so good that they begin talking to their friends about how poorly acting the young children are, how those young parents just don’t have their acts together, and about how the church needs to do more for the older people like them. They get used to their comforts and the respect that others have shown them, and so they begin to separate their holiness from their lives. They feel they have arrived and don't need to keep working on their holiness.
Holiness becomes something theoretical, to be talked about like students who are solving the cube root of 127, never applying to our real lives, but instead being reserved for the safe confines of the Bible study class. After all, everyone knows that we are good people, and therefore, whatever we do and say must be the actions and words of good people. And so, at first, our Saturdays lose their holiness and we honk at the slow people in front of us at the traffic light. And then, we start commenting to our friends in church about the three-year-old that laughs and giggles in the sanctuary, we look at the cut of the young mother’s dress and point out to her that that cut isn’t suitable for church, and we are simply happy when the children who sit behind us aren’t there to kick our pew. Our pew.
And then, one day, we see the pew as our pew, our bible, our hymnal, our carpet, our worship service, our church – and we have become the little old woman or man in the story, for we forgot that staying on the path of holiness gets tougher every day as we grow older, least we forget that God made the sacrifice for us! We did not sacrifice for God! – We simply returned what was God’s in gratitude. But we looked around at other people who walked different paths and we want what they have instead of what God has given us for today and in the centuries after we join God in New Jerusalem. So while we at first turned to God in gratitude, our envy of others leads us to now look at following Christ as sacrifice. And we become crabby to others.
Yet, as Hosea wrote, God does not desire our sacrifice, but mercy to others.
Martin Luther, the most important of the reformers who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500’s, helped us understand sin in a way that helps us understand why Christians continue to sin. According to Luther, we must recognize that there are two different ways the word “sin” is used in Christianity.
But even before these two definitions, let us go back to the root of the word. “Sin” comes from the French word “sine”, which meant “outside”. When shooting an arrow at a target, if you missed the target, the spotter called, “sine” – “outside”. It is related to the same sense that “sine” in trigonometry means “opposite over the hypotenuse” of a triangle. It is the distance from the target to the arrow where it hits. “Sine” means “outside”. And so “sin” means we are outside of God’s will for us, we have missed the target, we have shot at too much of an angle - or perhaps we have tried to get too much of an angle?
So the first meaning, the common meaning of sin is a crime against God. A sin action is a crime against God. When we steal a car, a horse, or a pencil, we have sinned. We have broken one of the 613 commandments that God gave to people in the first five books of the Bible. Sin is a crime committed against God, against the king of the Universe.
But there is a more important use of the word “sin”. There is, you see, the “condition of sin”.
We are born in sin. We are all naturally born in the condition of being in rebellion to God. The condition of sin is the condition of rebellion. An infant is in rebellion – have you noticed that a baby is the most selfish individual you can find? We even compare selfish adults to acting like children or acting like babies. "You're such a baby!" we say.
And so, we all begin in the condition of sin. We are in rebellion to God, the King of the Universe. And because we are in rebellion to the King, we don’t really care what the King’s laws are. In fact, we might just break some laws just to show the King that we are in rebellion. And we all know that the punishment for treason, for being in rebellion is death. And as a rebel, we break laws right and left. We commit acts of sin right and left.
But one day, we meet the King’s Son and decide these rulers aren’t that bad. In fact, we decide to follow the King’s Son and now we are out of the condition of sin and the King declares us “not guilty” of the crime of treason, the King pardons us and we no longer need to keep an eye out for the King’s soldiers. We have become Christian followers.
But there is still a problem. We spent so long not caring about what the King thought that we didn’t bother to learn the Kings Laws, and so we are surprised to find out that some things go against the King’s law. And so it takes us a while to clean up our spoken language. We find out that we are not supposed to have piercings or tattoos and we are worried and ashamed. We ask the King to forgive us and the King is happy to forgive us, for the King is delighted that we are no longer in rebellion, but are trying to follow His Son. And so it goes.
We still commit acts of sin for the simple reason that we have lived so long ignoring the Law that we have a hard time following the Law now that we care about the King and His Son. Yet, if we continue to study and learn what the King desires, we will commit less and less acts of sin each day, each week, each year. And so, hopefully, we will grow closer to the King’s will for us over time. Yet, we may still commit acts of sin without being in a state of sin.
But there is another reason that Christians continue to sin. It is because of a certain complacency which has been generated because words change their meaning over time, yet the church has continued to use the same words over the centuries.
“Believe in God. Believe also in Me” Jesus said in John 14. In our modern usage, “to believe in” someone often means “to accept their existence.” If I believe in God, if I believe in Jesus, the modern usage implies that I accept they exist. So far, so good – for it is necessary to accept the existence of God and Christ for our salvation to happen.
But 400 years ago in our early English translations, and also in the original Greek, "belief" had a more comprehensive meaning. “To believe in” a person meant to put our hopes, our aspirations, our trust in that person, just as in modern America people will believe in one or another politician. In the 2016 election, there were people who believed in Bernie Sanders, who believed that Bernie would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. In the same way, other people believed in Donald Trump, believing that Trump would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. Likewise Hillary Clinton, many people believed in her, that she would transform the country, that she could be trusted, that her program was transformative, critical, and correct. We are to believe in Jesus at least as much as people have in these politicians. (You will also notice that there were people who did not believe in any of these politicians, for they had become either wise or cynical, ever hoping but not believing. )
When Jesus says, “Believe in God. Believe also in Me”, Jesus is asking us to do far more than just believe in the existence of God and Jesus. Jesus is asking us in our hearts to believe that He will transform the world, that He can be trusted, that his program is transformative, critical, and correct. When we are asked to “believe in His Holy Name”, we are being asked to believe that as God’s Son, the Son of God, Jesus has the power and the ability and the desire to save us for eternity, to change the present world, to give our lives purpose and meaning. It is far, far, far more than simply believing in His existence.
For if we simply think that a one time declaration of belief, even a one-time declaration of faith, a baptism by water – or even by water and the Spirit – is enough, then we are not reading and listening to what Jesus has told us He expects of His followers. For He says to believe in Him twice, but He says to follow Him eighty times.
You see, if we take the simple way, holding that a simple belief in the existence of Christ is all that is necessary – then the world will come back and choke out what little faith we have, because we will have fallen asleep, secure in our belief that Christ existed and we had done all that was necessary.
There supposedly was a man back in the early days of World War II when the income tax was extended from covering only a handful of very wealthy people to covering virtually everyone. Everyone was on board with fighting the war, worried about the Japanese and the Germans. So, wanting to do his part, the man said, “What do I have to do?” And the response he heard was “mail in your Form 1040.” So he put his name on the Form 1040 and mailed it to the IRS without filling out the rest of the form or sending in any money. He had done what he thought was enough – but we all know it wasn’t what was needed. If everyone had responded as he did, the war would have been lost. Clearly, much more was needed - treasure, blood, sweat, and tears were needed.
We, too, are in a war, a spiritual war. As Paul points out, we struggle against hidden powers, against spiritual princes and rulers of this planet – demonic and devilish forces. Just as a man or woman who has been through basic military training – and believes that he or she has learned all there is about battle, the man or woman who has learned the basics of Christianity still has a lot more to learn.
But you know, when that new private comes home for leave after basic training, he or she can still teach other people things about how to fight the enemy, how to survive the enemy’s attacks, and besides, that new private is much stronger than when they began. And so it is with Christianity – even a newly baptized Christian is spiritually much stronger than the ordinary lost soul, able to teach them something which may lead them to eternal life.
In the original Greek, the word pneuma is translated to English in three ways. Pneuma can be translated as Spirit, or breath, or wind – the word meant all three things in Greek. So when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we could just as easily speak of the Holy Breath or the Holy Wind. And the Holy Spirit is intimately connected to the pursuit of holiness.
So teach others what you know and strive to learn more about the path of holiness. Don’t sit down by the path and watch others walk past – get up and walk with them. For it is when we sit down by the path that our spiritual muscles begin to weaken, our spiritual lungs lose their spiritual breath, our spiritual eyes lose sight of where we were headed – and we begin to sin once more, complaining, gossiping, backbiting, despairing, hurting others – and ourselves – and walking as secular people without the Holy Spirit.
And so, if we sit down by the path of holiness, watching others instead of walking along, learning, working, praying, running with the Holy Wind behind us with the Holy Breath coming in and out of our spiritual lungs, we will begin to ignore the Spirit, like people who sit for a long time forget they are breathing. And then we will begin to sin once more. Instead, we must walk the path, breathing in the holy breath, with the holy wind at our back, listening to the holy Spirit.
And one day, in this church – and in any church – someone may walk up to you and say something totally out-of-line, something totally mean and nasty and insulting and terrible! And they will mean it! Worse yet, I might be that person!
So how do we handle this when someone is mean to us in the church?
We look at our friend, we swallow the words we feel like saying, and instead we practice what is perhaps the most difficult yet important discipline of the mature Christian believer: We love them and forgive them. We turn to the witnesses and say, “Wow. I guess our friend must be under some stress today. Let’s pray our friend has a better afternoon.” And then you do just that.
And God smiles, because you have just shown God that you understand forgiveness and are trying to follow the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who forgave us even though He had to go to the cross for us.
Give thanks for God’s love today. Step up and pray a prayer of forgiveness for someone who has hurt you. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Come to speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me.
Somewhere around that five year stage, they level off, like an airplane that has reached cruising altitude, and if they are like most people, they will stay about the same until they’ve been attending church about twenty years. Somewhere around that time, they will become very involved in the church in some leadership role – they lead a Sunday school class, they become a trustee, their husband or wife is a trustee, they organize funeral dinners, etc. And it is then that the rot most commonly hits them.
They now believe that they are essentially sinless Christian leaders who have practiced so well that staying holy is easy. In fact, they are so good that they begin talking to their friends about how poorly acting the young children are, how those young parents just don’t have their acts together, and about how the church needs to do more for the older people like them. They get used to their comforts and the respect that others have shown them, and so they begin to separate their holiness from their lives. They feel they have arrived and don't need to keep working on their holiness.
Holiness becomes something theoretical, to be talked about like students who are solving the cube root of 127, never applying to our real lives, but instead being reserved for the safe confines of the Bible study class. After all, everyone knows that we are good people, and therefore, whatever we do and say must be the actions and words of good people. And so, at first, our Saturdays lose their holiness and we honk at the slow people in front of us at the traffic light. And then, we start commenting to our friends in church about the three-year-old that laughs and giggles in the sanctuary, we look at the cut of the young mother’s dress and point out to her that that cut isn’t suitable for church, and we are simply happy when the children who sit behind us aren’t there to kick our pew. Our pew.
And then, one day, we see the pew as our pew, our bible, our hymnal, our carpet, our worship service, our church – and we have become the little old woman or man in the story, for we forgot that staying on the path of holiness gets tougher every day as we grow older, least we forget that God made the sacrifice for us! We did not sacrifice for God! – We simply returned what was God’s in gratitude. But we looked around at other people who walked different paths and we want what they have instead of what God has given us for today and in the centuries after we join God in New Jerusalem. So while we at first turned to God in gratitude, our envy of others leads us to now look at following Christ as sacrifice. And we become crabby to others.
Yet, as Hosea wrote, God does not desire our sacrifice, but mercy to others.
Martin Luther, the most important of the reformers who broke away from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500’s, helped us understand sin in a way that helps us understand why Christians continue to sin. According to Luther, we must recognize that there are two different ways the word “sin” is used in Christianity.
But even before these two definitions, let us go back to the root of the word. “Sin” comes from the French word “sine”, which meant “outside”. When shooting an arrow at a target, if you missed the target, the spotter called, “sine” – “outside”. It is related to the same sense that “sine” in trigonometry means “opposite over the hypotenuse” of a triangle. It is the distance from the target to the arrow where it hits. “Sine” means “outside”. And so “sin” means we are outside of God’s will for us, we have missed the target, we have shot at too much of an angle - or perhaps we have tried to get too much of an angle?
So the first meaning, the common meaning of sin is a crime against God. A sin action is a crime against God. When we steal a car, a horse, or a pencil, we have sinned. We have broken one of the 613 commandments that God gave to people in the first five books of the Bible. Sin is a crime committed against God, against the king of the Universe.
But there is a more important use of the word “sin”. There is, you see, the “condition of sin”.
We are born in sin. We are all naturally born in the condition of being in rebellion to God. The condition of sin is the condition of rebellion. An infant is in rebellion – have you noticed that a baby is the most selfish individual you can find? We even compare selfish adults to acting like children or acting like babies. "You're such a baby!" we say.
And so, we all begin in the condition of sin. We are in rebellion to God, the King of the Universe. And because we are in rebellion to the King, we don’t really care what the King’s laws are. In fact, we might just break some laws just to show the King that we are in rebellion. And we all know that the punishment for treason, for being in rebellion is death. And as a rebel, we break laws right and left. We commit acts of sin right and left.
But one day, we meet the King’s Son and decide these rulers aren’t that bad. In fact, we decide to follow the King’s Son and now we are out of the condition of sin and the King declares us “not guilty” of the crime of treason, the King pardons us and we no longer need to keep an eye out for the King’s soldiers. We have become Christian followers.
But there is still a problem. We spent so long not caring about what the King thought that we didn’t bother to learn the Kings Laws, and so we are surprised to find out that some things go against the King’s law. And so it takes us a while to clean up our spoken language. We find out that we are not supposed to have piercings or tattoos and we are worried and ashamed. We ask the King to forgive us and the King is happy to forgive us, for the King is delighted that we are no longer in rebellion, but are trying to follow His Son. And so it goes.
We still commit acts of sin for the simple reason that we have lived so long ignoring the Law that we have a hard time following the Law now that we care about the King and His Son. Yet, if we continue to study and learn what the King desires, we will commit less and less acts of sin each day, each week, each year. And so, hopefully, we will grow closer to the King’s will for us over time. Yet, we may still commit acts of sin without being in a state of sin.
But there is another reason that Christians continue to sin. It is because of a certain complacency which has been generated because words change their meaning over time, yet the church has continued to use the same words over the centuries.
“Believe in God. Believe also in Me” Jesus said in John 14. In our modern usage, “to believe in” someone often means “to accept their existence.” If I believe in God, if I believe in Jesus, the modern usage implies that I accept they exist. So far, so good – for it is necessary to accept the existence of God and Christ for our salvation to happen.
But 400 years ago in our early English translations, and also in the original Greek, "belief" had a more comprehensive meaning. “To believe in” a person meant to put our hopes, our aspirations, our trust in that person, just as in modern America people will believe in one or another politician. In the 2016 election, there were people who believed in Bernie Sanders, who believed that Bernie would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. In the same way, other people believed in Donald Trump, believing that Trump would transform the country, that he could be trusted, that his program was transformative, critical, and correct. Likewise Hillary Clinton, many people believed in her, that she would transform the country, that she could be trusted, that her program was transformative, critical, and correct. We are to believe in Jesus at least as much as people have in these politicians. (You will also notice that there were people who did not believe in any of these politicians, for they had become either wise or cynical, ever hoping but not believing. )
When Jesus says, “Believe in God. Believe also in Me”, Jesus is asking us to do far more than just believe in the existence of God and Jesus. Jesus is asking us in our hearts to believe that He will transform the world, that He can be trusted, that his program is transformative, critical, and correct. When we are asked to “believe in His Holy Name”, we are being asked to believe that as God’s Son, the Son of God, Jesus has the power and the ability and the desire to save us for eternity, to change the present world, to give our lives purpose and meaning. It is far, far, far more than simply believing in His existence.
For if we simply think that a one time declaration of belief, even a one-time declaration of faith, a baptism by water – or even by water and the Spirit – is enough, then we are not reading and listening to what Jesus has told us He expects of His followers. For He says to believe in Him twice, but He says to follow Him eighty times.
You see, if we take the simple way, holding that a simple belief in the existence of Christ is all that is necessary – then the world will come back and choke out what little faith we have, because we will have fallen asleep, secure in our belief that Christ existed and we had done all that was necessary.
There supposedly was a man back in the early days of World War II when the income tax was extended from covering only a handful of very wealthy people to covering virtually everyone. Everyone was on board with fighting the war, worried about the Japanese and the Germans. So, wanting to do his part, the man said, “What do I have to do?” And the response he heard was “mail in your Form 1040.” So he put his name on the Form 1040 and mailed it to the IRS without filling out the rest of the form or sending in any money. He had done what he thought was enough – but we all know it wasn’t what was needed. If everyone had responded as he did, the war would have been lost. Clearly, much more was needed - treasure, blood, sweat, and tears were needed.
We, too, are in a war, a spiritual war. As Paul points out, we struggle against hidden powers, against spiritual princes and rulers of this planet – demonic and devilish forces. Just as a man or woman who has been through basic military training – and believes that he or she has learned all there is about battle, the man or woman who has learned the basics of Christianity still has a lot more to learn.
But you know, when that new private comes home for leave after basic training, he or she can still teach other people things about how to fight the enemy, how to survive the enemy’s attacks, and besides, that new private is much stronger than when they began. And so it is with Christianity – even a newly baptized Christian is spiritually much stronger than the ordinary lost soul, able to teach them something which may lead them to eternal life.
In the original Greek, the word pneuma is translated to English in three ways. Pneuma can be translated as Spirit, or breath, or wind – the word meant all three things in Greek. So when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we could just as easily speak of the Holy Breath or the Holy Wind. And the Holy Spirit is intimately connected to the pursuit of holiness.
So teach others what you know and strive to learn more about the path of holiness. Don’t sit down by the path and watch others walk past – get up and walk with them. For it is when we sit down by the path that our spiritual muscles begin to weaken, our spiritual lungs lose their spiritual breath, our spiritual eyes lose sight of where we were headed – and we begin to sin once more, complaining, gossiping, backbiting, despairing, hurting others – and ourselves – and walking as secular people without the Holy Spirit.
And so, if we sit down by the path of holiness, watching others instead of walking along, learning, working, praying, running with the Holy Wind behind us with the Holy Breath coming in and out of our spiritual lungs, we will begin to ignore the Spirit, like people who sit for a long time forget they are breathing. And then we will begin to sin once more. Instead, we must walk the path, breathing in the holy breath, with the holy wind at our back, listening to the holy Spirit.
And one day, in this church – and in any church – someone may walk up to you and say something totally out-of-line, something totally mean and nasty and insulting and terrible! And they will mean it! Worse yet, I might be that person!
So how do we handle this when someone is mean to us in the church?
We look at our friend, we swallow the words we feel like saying, and instead we practice what is perhaps the most difficult yet important discipline of the mature Christian believer: We love them and forgive them. We turn to the witnesses and say, “Wow. I guess our friend must be under some stress today. Let’s pray our friend has a better afternoon.” And then you do just that.
And God smiles, because you have just shown God that you understand forgiveness and are trying to follow the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who forgave us even though He had to go to the cross for us.
Give thanks for God’s love today. Step up and pray a prayer of forgiveness for someone who has hurt you. Take an opportunity to pray for yourself and for a friend, neighbor, or family member. Come to speak through the Spirit to the Father that sent His Son to die just for you…and me.
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