Sin Reframed

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  1 John 2:1 (NIV) My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. CONSIDER THIS Is it possible to not sin? As I read John, I don’t think he means sinlessness or some kind of flawless perfection. John’s getting at what it means to be made perfect in love. Sin, for John, is disobedience to the singular command of Jesus: My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. (John 15:12) Disobedience to Jesus can be brought back to this one thing: the failure to “love each other as I have loved you.” Sin is the failure to love other people in the way Jesus loves us. Could it really be this simple? To be made perfect in love means growing in the love of God for other people. I have typically thought of sin as doing something wrong. What if I thought instead of sin as doing harm to other people? It ceases to be so much about my failure and a lot more about their pain. What if to “not sin” isn’t all about managing my behavior but is rather about consistently and progressively extending myself in love for other people? John Wesley had a lot to say about this. In fact, 1 John was among his very favorite books in the Bible. In a letter he composed on the subject, he put it like this: Entire sanctification, or Christian perfection, is neither more nor less than pure love; love expelling sin, and governing both the heart and life of a child of God. The Refiner’s fire purges out all that is contrary to love, and that many times by a pleasing smart. Leave all this to Him that does all things well, and that loves you better than you do yourself.1 My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. (KJ21) John saw the possibility of life on another plane—of “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Do you believe it is possible? THE PRAYER  Abba Father, I confess that, instead of believing in the possibility of the power of your love, I have readily settled for the predictability of sin. I confess that I have chosen to see sin more in the light of its impact on me than its injury to others. For these reasons I have come to tolerate sin as the inevitable destiny of my life. Come, Holy Spirit, and deliver me from this self-centered vision, which blinds me from seeing others. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.