Sin vs Sin

So this past week has been crazy.  My cousin got married in Colorado Springs and my house turned into the house where my two sisters left their labs with our little lab puppy.  So Tozer, Panzer, and Ernst spent several days romping around our backyard.  This morning I got clean up duty.  I spent 15 minutes walking around with a plastic bag picking up dog poop of various sizes, shapes, and consistencies.  Not the most glamorous job.  As I walked around picking up the dog droppings I had more than a few minutes to contemplate why God chose to design living creatures with digestive systems that almost universally operate by expelling matter in such an unglamorous manner.  I chuckled to myself wondering if it might possibly be so that He would have a never ending metaphor for our sin and how He views our sin that we would understand in no uncertain terms.

The idea of our sin being abhorrent in the sight of God is often lost on us today.  Part of this is no doubt due to the modern message of Christ as a cosmic genie who will make your life better by the world's standards if you "accept Him."  That this message leads to a diminishing of the severity of sin really isn't a questionable fact, there is a direct correlation.  However, I think that a bigger reason that we have lost sight of the severity of our sin is because we don't even understand what the problem is.  We classify sin as action rather than as an inherent nature.  We say sin is lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, raping, etc.  And indeed these things are morally wrong.  But we do these things because we are sinners, we are not sinners because we do these things.  This is Jesus' whole point in the Sermon on the Mount.  Actions proceed from the heart.  Wicked actions proceed from a wicked heart.  We murder because we hate first.  We commit adultery because we lust first.  We lie to others because we first justify it in our heart.  And we love to keep sin in the realm of action because by doing so we are able to compare ourselves by ourselves.  If sin is indeed only the actions of lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, etc., then if I only lie and cheat, then I am OK because I am not a murderer.  This allows us to calm our conscience and ignore the fact that the problem isn't our action, it is the heart that leads to the action. 

Please don't misunderstand me, the actions are still wrong, as in fact they stand as the evidence of the sin in the heart.  But when all we do is deal with the action we create men and women who are very good and putting forth a persona that looks and acts the part without any real heart change.  Jesus came to go after the heart.  The actions will follow, but chase hard after Christ and let Him change the heart.