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 very 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. 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 Belizeans about the worst is to get angry; immorality is understandable to them, but anger calls into question one’s Christianity.

With that prologue, I suppose I have no right to claim any favorite sin of my own. Perhaps we can safely say that all of the above sins are serious enough to be 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 comfortably. It is true that Biblical teachers such as Paul and Jesus had a whole list of sins but they did not seem to list them 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” and ambiguous to us. 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 the sins we hate less.

I suppose my favorite sin to hate- if I am still allowed to have one after the above spiel- is the way Christians can interpret Scripture in a way so that they can do largely what they want. This goes across the board, from selfishness to greed, and materialism. Many Christian will steer clear from sexual sins but totally ignoring Jesus’ words about “loving the [global] neighbor as one’s self,” justifying living on an economic level 50 or a hundred time that of those starving; caring about abortion rightly, but ignoring the thousands of already born persons dying each day of hunger and lack of simple medicines; believing in evangelism but hoarding wealth for habitation, transportation, and security- rather than to carry the Gospel to the ends of the earth. We may support the causes of God with a token stewardship of the tithe and squandering the rest on comforts and cultural ideals. Yes, I may have my “favorite” sins, but I hope they agree with God’s love and desire for all mankind to have the Abundant Life for which he spared not his own Son. 

The Western church needs a cultural revolution where once more it 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 into a needy world. Where we are dead to sins, not only to our favorite gray ones which are easy and comfortable to avoid, but the hard ones that call for a radical transformation of our style of life. Being “dead to sin” means also to be free from the affluence preoccupation that the church and polite society accept. Again, our economic standard of living should not be determined by culture or church friends, but by Christ and the will of God for all of us as responsible stewards of our wealth. What would God really want to do in the wider world through the wealth he has given to his people? Hasn’t God given the church the economic resources to carry the full gospel to a lost and impoverished world speedily. Should we not be much more concerned to share our resources so that many more in the world could share in the Abundant Life we enjoy? (Rather than hoard it for ourselves.)