Sins and Sin

In his book, What Is the Gospel?, Greg Gilbert helps us to understand the difference between understanding oneself to be guilty of sins, and knowing oneself to be guilty of sin:

Most people have no problem at all admitting that they’ve committed sins (plural), at least so long as they can think about those sins as isolated little mistakes in an otherwise pretty good life—a parking ticket here or there on an otherwise clean record.

Sins don’t shock us much. We know they are there, we see them in ourselves and others every day, and we’ve gotten pretty used to them. What is shocking to us is when God shows us the sin that runs to the very depths of our hearts, the deep-running deposits of filth and corruption that we never knew existed in us and that we ourselves could never expunge. That’s how the Bible talks about the depth and darkness of our sin—it is in us and of us, not just on us.

Some Scripture he references to support this:

• “we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3)
• “out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander” (Matt. 15:19)
• “the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot” (Rom. 8:7)

Gilbert continues with the implication this has on how we understand the gospel:

It’s not enough to say that Jesus came to save us from sins, if what we mean by that is that he came to save us from our isolated mistakes. It’s only when we realize that our very nature is sinful—that we are indeed “dead in our trespasses and sin,” as Paul says (Eph. 2:1, 5)—that we see just how good the news is that there is a way to be saved.

When I first read this, I thought back to this past Sunday, on the sermon that Jesse Terasaki preached about King David and his sin (I encourage you to listen to it at the Lighthouse website). One point that he made was that David is described as “a man after God’s own heart” not because he was more morally righteous than his predecessor, but in part because he had a right view of his sin against a holy and righteous God. If you, like me, want to grow in hating our sin, I encourage you to pray and meditate on Psalm 51, where in verse 4 David prays:

Against you, you only, have I sinned

and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you may be justified in your words

and blameless in your judgment.