What is My Worst Sin?

(Or What is God’s Desire for Christians Living in an Affluent Culture in a World of Desperate Needs?)                                                     

                                                         

Many people have their favorite sin to hate. When I was young the most unforgivable sin was murder. We didn't expect to see anyone in heaven who had killed someone. Later it was adultery that was hardly remediable. Today for some it is harming the environment. Probably child abuse is near the top, or is it the bottom of worst sins followed closely by domestic abuse, especially men against women.  For evangelicals, homosexuality ranks high. For the liberal it is capital punishment and war. For the conservative it is big government and doubt of the literal truth of the Bible. The Singer Keith Green emphasized that judgment will be based on “what they did and didn’t do” with reference to the poor and unjust victims of society. For some in Belize, where we lived for years, about the worst sin was to get angry; immorality was understandable to them, but anger called into question one’s Christianity.

With that prologue, I suppose I have no right to claim any favorite sin to hate of my own. Perhaps we can safely say that all of the above sins are serious enough to warrant our attention. Perhaps on the positive side, it is good that at least someone is drawing attention to the serious faults of mankind. On the negative, it is a serious fault to regard any sin as worthy of our total focus so other sins can then be lived with more comfortably. It is true that Biblical teachers such as Paul and Jesus had a whole list of sins that they did not seem to list in order of seriousness. Anger is listed there with immorality, but so also is greed; and covetousness is in the Ten Commandments along with murder. But anger and greed and covetousness can be rationalized away easier than murder and so seem more “gray”. So we have many other gray sins that we can reason away so as to accommodate to our culture, religious and personal values and be at peace with these sins we hate less.

I suppose my favorite sin to hate is the way Christians can do just that- interpret Scripture in a way so that they can justify largely what they want. This goes across the board, from selfishness to greed, materialism, and militarism. Many Christian will also steer from sexual sins but totally ignoring Jesus’ words about “loving the [global] neighbor as one’s self,” permitting them to live on an economic level 50 or a hundred time that of starving millions.  They rightly hate abortion, but ignore the thousands of already born persons dying each day of hunger and lack of simple medicines. They believe in evangelism but hoard wealth in the form of mansions, vehicles, and security- rather than to carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They support the causes of God with a token stewardship of the tithe and perhaps a bit more and then spend the rest on comforts and cultural ideals. Yes, this is my favorite sin to hate, but I believe it agrees with God’s word and his Heart as He reveals it by the life and teachings of Jesus. The Western church needs a cultural revolution where it once more  responds to the words of Paul, not to let the “world” wrap it self around [it], but to be transformed by a new mind which follows Christ instead; where we are dead to sins of cultural conformity. Our usual favorite sins to hate are easier and more comfortable to avoid, but the “gray” ones call for a radical transformation of our style of life. Being “dead to sin” also means to be unresponsive to the affluency sins that the church and polite society accept as well as what is rightly rejected.  Again, our economic standard of living should not be determined primarily by a "Christian" culture or a compromising church, but by Christ and the will of God for all of us as responsible stewards of wealth. What would God really want to do in the wide world through the resources he has given to his people? [Again, Keith Green said, “It is not God’s fault that the lost are not being reached.”] Hasn’t God given the church the economic resources to carry the Gospel to a lost and impoverished world, which the present church is using too much on itself, all of us Christians doing our part in this?