Wow - it's been awhile

Since my last post, life has been quite hectic and stressful. I've not experienced life to this extent in... ever, since I can remember. Mind you, I've become one of those forgetful adults so that doesn't say very much.

We're nearly at the end of the renovation process. Our possessions are strewn all over the neighbourhood in between our own house, my in-laws house, their neighbours' homes and my own parents' house.

School has been chugging along since September. It's been a whirlwind. I can't believe December is nearly upon us.

My own ministry has also been plugging along. Due to it, I've been given the opportunity to study Luke independently. The only help I have is the reading plan for kids found at this site Use the search term "bible reading plan". I adapt what David Murray created for his own children for the kids attending our ministry program. Then I give a bible lesson based on the week's passage. I also use Mars Hill Church sermons as references. Please use these resources! They're very helpful and solidly based on scripture.

Anyway, the reason I've come to post is this very excellent description of sin.

Mull it over.

Think about it.

Pray about it.

Talk about it.

John is calling people to repent of sin. Sin is a mega theme of your Bible. The Bible speaks of it with a constellation of images, and metaphors, and analogies, and words. Cornelius Plantinga wrote a great book called, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. And he defines sin in this way: “The Bible presents sin by way of major concepts, principally lawlessness and faithlessness, expressed in an array of images: sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. Sin is blindness and deafness. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it—both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack or evade or neglect their divine calling. These and other images suggest deviance: even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and then resistance to divine restoration of that harmony. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God.”

Sin is going too far. It’s not going far enough. It’s a hard heart, a stiff neck. Sin is living your life with anyone or anything other than the God of the Bible as the center of your identity, and the source of your joy. Sin is what we think, what we feel, what we do. It is what we fail to think, feel, and do. Sin is commission, where we do that which is evil. It is also omission, where we fail to do that which is right. Sin is not just action, it’s also conditioned. We are sinners by nature and choice. The Bible says, in fact, from our mother’s womb. It’s all the way down in the roots. Sin is the human problem that leads to all of the -isms: racism, classism. All of that is the result of sin. But sin is the root problem, and we can trace all of the effects. And if we don’t get to the root of the problem, which is sin, our lives, our cultures, our world never changes.

Taken from Mark Driscoll's sermon given May 2010