"In Adams fall, we sinned all" (The New England Primer).
"God be merciful to me, the sinner" (cf. Luke 18:13, NASB).
"This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief" (1 Tim. 1:15, NKJ).
"... 'For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance'" (Matt. 9:13, NKJV, cf. Luke 5:32).
We must present the bad news of sin before the good news of Christ! In other words: Get them lost first! The people are enslaved to sin and must be set free, self-help is no help, they need supernatural intervention by God's Spirit on their hearts. It is sad that people think sin demonstrates their freedom, it only proves and shows their slavery. We are all in the same boat, lost in sin just like one drowns in 700 feet of water as well as seven feet. It is not the evangelist's job to convict of sin--that's the prerogative of the Holy Spirit! Jesus came to save us from our sins (cf. Matt. 1:21) and was not aloof from sinners but reached out to them, getting down and dirty with common men.
Sin is the way to go if you want popularity or to be cool; being holy is being square, uncool, or naive. You have to be savoir-faire and know your way around the block, wise to the ways of the world, known as being streetwise or familiar with the game called life. People nowadays believe that moral principles have evolved and adultery is no longer wrong, but anything goes if you can make up half-baked excuses for it or self-justification or rationalization. Psychology won't even admit to the existence of sin. Why? Because Albert Camus said it best: "The absurd is sin without God!" Dr. Karl Menninger, America's Freud and a Christian psychologist and psychiatrist, wrote a book entitled Whatever Became of Sin?
Psychology tends to see sin as mere deviance from the so-called norm (which is arbitrary, not absolute). It seems like sin is creeping back into our vocabulary as we search for the answer: we have found all the questions, according to G. K. Chesterton, now is the time to find the answers! I believe we cannot solve our personal problems, and sin is the culprit, but we can manage them and get them under control--there's no such thing as sinless perfection in this life, because all Christians are merely works-in-progress, at varying stages of maturity and development.
Sin is sometimes called by pretty names to make it more palatable: mistakes, poor judgment, weakness, bad habit, or even falling short of our own standards, not to mention God's, whose standard is the ultimate measure and judgment of sin. We tend to glamorize sin and are becoming immune to its effect and influence, or even shock value as we see murder, rape, theft, etc., on TV and don't blink an eye because we are used to it and it doesn't offend us anymore--it seems okay to observe sin, but not do it? The problem we have today in reclassifying sin and in not calling a spade a spade, as it were, is that we get enticed and drawn in unknowingly and become insensitive or immune to its influence. If you were to take your bottle of rat poison and label it as candy in your cabinet, don't be surprised if your kids eat it--by changing labels and not coming to grips with what it is, we make it all the more dangerous!
Sin is our birthright and no one is immune from it--it's universal and no one can escape its clutches or power except by the grace of God in salvation. The unbeliever has no power over his sin nature and can only sin, while the Christian has the ability to refrain from sin, as he has the ability to still sin at will. We have become inoculated from sin, so we are unaware of its full impact. Sin can be defined as our Declaration of Independence from God and a virus that affects everyone, for the Bible states: "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (cf. Romans 3:23). The first step to solving a problem with sin is admitting you have one, and the problem with sinners is that they don't see or admit their own personal sin--they justify themselves, which is the normal reaction.
We all have fallen short of God's ideal standard set by Christ in living the perfect life of obedience--the word, hamartia in Koine, or common Greek, means to "miss the mark" and is a marksman's word. We aren't expected to be as "glorious" as God, for even Adam wasn't, but we miss the standard of the Law of Moses, which sets the precedents for all good and moral behavior and ethics for us to live by. Sin is indeed a disease and we are all affected, no one is immune: we all have shortcomings, even by our own standards, and no one even lives up to his own expectations.
The command by God is to repent and turn from our wicked ways and follow on to know the Lord; we must renounce and denounce our sin and confess it, or say the same thing about it as God does, not some lame excuse for what we do in self-justification, which is our tendency. Sin has been our downfall: "... For you have stumbled because of your iniquity" (Hosea 14:1, NKJV). We all can admit that there are things we "ought to have done," or have done something that wasn't God's will.
Remember the words of God to Cain in Gen. 4:7: "Sin wants to destroy you, but don't let it." Sin is self-destructive and may be seen as a virus that has affected all mankind. The point in seeing ourselves as sinners is to awaken us to the fact that we cannot save ourselves, we cannot keep God's Law, and we are powerless over it; this ought to make us see our need for salvation, not make us just resolve to do better or take a self-improvement course, as it were, lifting ourselves up by our own bootstraps engaging in a mere do-it-yourself proposition of good works or deeds.
Repentance is more than turning over a new leaf, reforming ourselves, making a resolution, or vowing to do better next time, but a change of heart, mind, and will from the inside out, that results in a change of behavior to prove its reality--that it's not bogus. The purpose of God laying down the Law was not to show us a way of salvation, but to show us how bad we are and we are bad enough to need salvation; we should be suing God for mercy, not trying to save ourselves by good behavior, morality, ethics, philosophy, religious ritual, or good works or deeds--the essence of religion (works-based, not faith-based). Pray for a lively sense of sin, says Samuel Rutherford, because the more we get it, the less we sin--gross sinners aren't aware of the degree of their depravity, while saints have a fine-tuned and sensitive conscience, that notices minutiae of sin.
Man is not basically good nor inherently good, but lost this at the Fall of Adam, and is basically and intrinsically evil through and through--if sin or evil would be yellow, we'd be all yellow--and it is affecting his entire being, which needs salvation--mind, heart, and will. Note that even the will is stubborn and recalcitrant and needs salvaging by God and God must melt the heart and make one willing to believe by His wooing and drawing of the Holy Spirit. We all "enjoy" our solidarity with Adam--yes, sin is fun and games for a limited time, then new sins must be found; Hebrews 11:25 says that there is pleasure in it for a season. Theologians have analyzed man's nature and found him wanting: He is not a sinner because he sins; rather, he sins because he's a sinner--we all born sinners and cannot escape our birthright; i.e., we sin and err from the womb (cf. Psalm 58:3). Sin made its entree in Adam's fall and we confirm that sin by repeating it ourselves, showing we are no better.
Psychologists tend to blame society and the environment or even one's parents for our sins, but this is a cop-out, and escaping our duty and responsibility. The first sin was committed in a perfect environment! We all know better and don't need a lecture to tell us we are sinners: Ovid said, "I see the better things and approve them, but I follow the worst." It has been said, though, that we are great sinners, but Christ is a great Savior. When we see ourselves as real sinners and unworthy in God's sight, we realize Christ is a real Savior.
We all have feet of clay and no can really clean up his act; we don't do any pre-salvation work (however, the work of God is to believe in Christ and this is all God's doing!) and we don't prepare ourselves for salvation, but come as we are in faith for our "healing" to be made whole, and God will do the transforming of our person to be made new in Christ's image. However, this is the catch-22 according to C. S. Lewis: We must see how bad we are to be good, and we don't know how bad we are till we have tried to be good! It's like finding out how addicted to cigarettes you are only after trying to quit, and realizing for the first time that you are not in control of your cravings.
No one fools God, for He sees through the veneer and all of us are in the same boat of being called sinners--He has leveled the playing field and demands repentance from all ("... but now God commands men everywhere to repent," according to Acts 17:30, NKJV). Christians are justified, but still, sinners (cf. Gal. 2:17). In the last analysis, sin is not just a shortcoming or weakness, but a sign of evil and a direct consequence of Adam's sin, as we have inherited this tendency to sin and cannot escape our birthright, except by the grace of God, who doesn't just whitewash us, but transforms us---a miracle in itself from the inside out. Soli Deo Gloria!
