SIN IS DEAD!!!

I kid you not. The word ‘sin’ has been removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. No doubt the time will come when most of them will remove the word. After all, we don’t sin anymore, we have a different lifestyle.

As all lifestyles are valid, we cannot say what anyone is doing is wrong. Therefore it is obvious that sin no longer exists, except in the mind of a few evangelical Christians who happen to believe that what God said in the bible is true.

What does the bible say? It certainly doesn’t say that the wages of your lifestyle is life. It does however say that the wages of sin is death.

We should not be surprised that secular society has removed the notion of sin. After all, some sections of the church removed it a long time ago. Theological liberalism is the main proponent of the ‘no sin’ theology.

This theology is the main foundation of those who want religion without the cross. This debilitating theological liberalism has been rejected by many of course. Perhaps most famous is the renunciation penned by H. Richard Niebuhr. Writing in 1953 he said this: “The liberal gospel consists of a God without wrath bringing people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through a Christ without a cross.”

In a nutshell, God is all loving so he wouldn’t send people to hell. That being the case we don’t need to worry about sin.

Not only that, the evangelical church is slowly turning its back on sin. Rarely do we hear any church leader speak of sin or holiness from the pulpit. The reason for this is simple. Christianity has become a supermarket product for Christians so they shop around the churches to find one that doesn’t offend them.

The church leader that wants to build his congregation and his income cannot afford to offend people that will move down the road to the next church if they are, so they preach a God without wrath. An all loving God who overlooks every discretion and says you can be happy and prosperous even though your life is a mess and the opposite of what his word says.

In one church I was a member of I asked that one Sunday meeting a month be turned into a ‘prayer concert’ where we would devote the time to prayer and praise.

I was told that we could not do that because it would upset some people and they might leave.

I have yet to find any reference in the New Testament that says whatever we do as a church we must not offend people. In fact, what I have read is quite the opposite. Jesus spent a lot of time offending religious leaders. Paul wrote some very nasty letters to some of the churches making it very clear that he was not impressed by their actions.

The scriptures show that the blessing of God is always conditional. ‘If you do this, I will do that’. If you repent (of sin) I will save you and fill you with the Holy Spirit.

Rather than get rid of the concept of sin, we need more than ever today a church that clearly enunciates the truth of salvation and that includes sin and its consequences. In other words, we need to take sin seriously.