THE BIGGER ISSUE OF SIN

Sin is more than bad behavior; it's a blindness that prevents us from living in our God-given identity as children of God. We need to move beyond simply focusing on rules to understanding the deeper truth about our unbreakable union with Christ.

• The church has traditionally reduced sin to a behavior-based, right-versus-wrong morality system
• The Greek word for sin (hamartia) actually means "distorted form" or "distorted image"
• Romans 6 teaches we are "dead to sin" yet we still make mistakes, pointing to a deeper meaning
• Nothing can separate us from God's love (Romans 8:38-39), contradicting the teaching that sin separates us
• Sin doesn't push God away but blinds us to seeing Him and ourselves correctly
• Behavioral problems are just fruit; we need to address the root causes in our identity
• Traditional teaching views salvation as a transaction while finished work theology emphasizes our union with God
• Understanding our identity in Christ naturally transforms behavior without legalistic rules

The challenge of faith is to stop living as if separation from God even exists and to embrace that we are fully united with Him through Christ.

Chapters

• 0:00 Revisiting the Bigger Issue of Sin
• 9:06 Sin as More Than Bad Behavior
• 16:24 Dead to Sin: Understanding Romans 6
• 21:37 Nothing Can Separate Us from God
• 29:03 Sin Blinds Rather Than Separates
• 38:33 Identity Restoration vs. Behavior Modification
• 47:33 Why This Teaching Isn't More Common
• 53:33 Reframing Theological Understanding

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

There's very few times that I like to revisit something that I've already talked about. But the more I'm I'm looking on Facebook and seeing what people are talking about, you know, you can go in there and you can see what Christians are going through a lot of times, the questions they have and different things like that. So I did decide this morning I'm going to revisit something because I think it's important. And again, I've talked about this before, but I also sat there and thought, and I said, well, maybe this is giving everybody a little bit of time to process it, to think about if they had any questions about what I said before. And it may hit a little bit different this time than it did before. It's not the same sermon, it's just coming, it's the same topic, just coming in a little bit different way with it and asking some different questions. You can see the TV up there. What we're going to talk about is the bigger, the bigger issue of sin. First of all, I'm so happy to see everybody. You know, obviously the uh the rapture didn't happen on the 23rd, so everybody's still here. So glad to see everybody. Um because of all that, people worried about the rapture and everything, you know. Supposedly, some of y'all don't know. I know some people don't watch the news and get on Facebook, but you know, there was a prediction made a rapture was gonna happen 23rd or 24th of September. And, you know, I mean, there were some people, it's amazing when you go on there and look at some of these Facebook videos. There's some there's some crazy folks out there. I'm not talking about the guy that made the prophecy, that's crazy enough. But I'm talking about people selling their homes. Literally giving, which don't make much sense because what you're gonna do with the money? You're fixing to leave. But uh, people literally giving vehicles away and giving their homes away because they thought they was fixing to be raptured the next day. Uh, it's just, it's, it's crazy. But when I get, I get on those and I'm not worried about them as much, but I like to get on there and read the comments of other people that's getting on there and just seeing what people saying, and you know, sin and the afterlife and what's gonna happen, heaven and hell, and all this kind of stuff, is a really big topic to people. Uh, I mean, we we know that anyway, but the more you get on there and see it when something like this happens, uh, the more you kind of get to see where people are stand right now, what what what they're thinking about. So I do want to revisit this and talk a little bit about it. Uh, it may be challenging a little bit to some. It may be a little different if you didn't, if you haven't come up in our church or you know, you haven't been here that much. It may be a little bit challenging, and that's okay. Uh, I say this all the time. I'll say it again today. You don't have to agree with every single thing that I say today. I just want you to have an open mind. I just want you to think, you know, uh beyond where you're at, open your mind up and be willing to think a little bit differently. Uh, and everything we say, we're gonna come back and we're gonna knock it down and and support it with scripture. If we can't support it with scripture, it's just my opinion. But if I can come back and support it with scripture, then that's what the word of God says. So we're gonna talk about the bigger issue. Uh, and the more I study on sin, the more I uh learn about it, the more I believe that the moral side of it, and when I'm talking about the moral side, I'm talking about the do's and the don'ts. The, you know, all the rules, all the things that we put in place and say you gotta do this or you can't do this. That's the do's and don'ts of it. That's the morality side of it. The more I learn about it, the more I see that the moral side of it is really the least important part. It really is. Now, the church has made it the most important part because we want to say you can do this, but you can't do this. If you do this, this is where you go. And if you do this, you're okay. So we've made it, we've turned it into a morality type thing. Uh, and we've been, as Christians, we've been conditioned to reduce sin down to a behavior. It's the things that we do in everyday life. Right or wrong, it's uh, you know, good or bad, it's moral or immoral. That's the way we're taught and we're trained to look at sin. The danger in doing this is that it blinds us to, I believe, a deeper truth. Because I believe we can always go a little bit deeper. You can just say sin is this, or sin is this, but you can always stop too and say, I want to go a little bit deeper. And I've said this, you know, several times when I've taught on this. Uh, I like to tell people what motivated me. Because I don't look at myself as being any more intelligent or any more, you know, religious or whatever than anybody else. There's just certain things the way my brain works, I like to go a little bit deeper. Some things when I read it, I'm like, okay, wait a minute now. If this was that important, what did Jesus say about it? And then I get in the word and figure out Jesus didn't say nothing about it. Nowhere in Scripture. So then more questions start coming. I'm saying, if this was so important, rapture, for example, you know, if that was so important, why didn't Jesus teach on it? Why didn't the disciples teach on it? So that's the kind of things that motivate me to get in the word and go beyond just surface and actually go a little bit deeper and say, let's let's dig into this a little bit. Let's let's go a little bit further into it. So I think the danger is that uh we're not willing, if we're just going to stay at surface level, then we're not willing to go deeper into these issues. Sin is more than bad behavior. We've said that so many times here, and I'll keep saying it. Sin is more than just bad behavior. It's a blindness that keeps us from living in our God-given identity. And I'm going to go into detail in just a minute to show you what I mean by it's a blindness. We're blind to certain things. So the easiest way, I think, to start this out and to look at it is to start with what we already know. That's always the best place to start. What am I firm on? What do I already believe to be truth? Start from there and then let's kick it off. And some of the things that we know to be true is sin shows up as behavior. It does. Okay. Sometimes we do some crazy stuff. We make some bad decisions. We do things that, you know, after we got get through doing it, we say, you know, God wouldn't be pleased with that. It happens. Okay? So sin itself or behaviors, they actually do happen. We know that to be a fact. There's no disputing. Lying, stealing, hurting other people, all these different kinds of things. It's real. So we're not denying the fact that things happen and people do things that in our minds we would say, you know, hey, that wouldn't be pleasing to God. Or that's not something I want to do in the church, or I'd want the church to know about. Those things actually are real, they do happen. But behavior is just the fruit of it. Uh we have to ask the question, what's the root? I think about like this, and I've gave this example. I won't go deep into it, but I've gave this example many times. Even in counseling, when I'm working with somebody, I always draw a little tree and I'll draw some apple. At first, I won't put anything on the tree and I'll say, What is this? What kind of tree is it? And they'll say, I don't know, it's just a tree. So then I'll take something and I'll just draw little circles on the tree and they'll say, Oh, that's an apple tree. Why? Because a tree is known by its fruit. Really wasn't an apple tree, but because you put little fruit on it, they automatically identify it as an apple tree. Great. A tree's known by its fruit. So the thing is, what we do a lot of times is we try to look at that fruit as behavior. Even in our own life, when we look at our own life and say that uh that we are known by our fruit, people judge us, people look at us, people determine and try to decide what our life is and who we are by what they see you do. You may not like that, it may not be truly who you are, but that's the way the outside people is gonna look at you a lot of times. They're gonna see what you do, they're gonna see where you go, they're gonna see who you hang out with, and they're gonna judge you off of what they're seeing. So a lot of times we try to fix, and I use it in counseling from the standpoint of saying, you know, if somebody's using drugs, boom, there's a there's a fruit on the tree right there. People can see that. If somebody's angry, that's a fruit. If somebody's depressed, that's a fruit. Why? Because we can see those things. You can see a depressed person. There's certain behaviors they exhibit. You can see an angry person. There's certain things they do, there's a way that they act. So what we try to do is we try to pick those things off the tree and say, we're gonna fix it. Okay, we just say, okay, you're angry, go to anger management. You're on drugs, go to rehab, you're this, you're that. And we always try to fix it by just picking that fruit off. But guess what happens next season? Fruit grows right back. Next season could be a next situation in your life, next circumstance, next thing that happens. And all of a sudden that stuff starts to come back. And what happens, we always word it like this. Well, I'm just stuck in this cycle. I'm just, this thing just keeps coming back around. That's why. Because we never dealt with it. We just picked it off the tree and thought it was gone. And I use it in counseling because this is the way I put it. If you want to kill the fruit, you got to go down and kill the root. Kill the root of the tree, the tree dies, tree dies, fruit dies. Real simple. I gotta go down beneath the surface and take care of the root cause of it. What's feeding that fruit? It's the roots. What's bringing nutrients to that fruit? It's the root. It's no different when we're talking about this in the standpoint of behavioral stuff. It's the same thing whether we're talking about uh counseling or whether we're talking about behaviors in Christianity. It ain't no different. So we've got to ask ourselves the deeper question and be willing to go there and say, I know what the fruit is. I can look at every one of you and you can look at me, and we can say, okay, I see some fruit on him. Good or bad. We know some things about each other. That's okay. But the deeper question is what's the root of it? What is what is feeding that thing? What is pushing that fruit to grow? So there's two verses here I want you to look at, beginning uh to start out with. Romans 6, verse 1 and 2. Let's read those a minute because this is a key point that you need to understand. And this is coming straight from the scripture. What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not. How shall we? That's key right there. How shall we who died to sin live in it any longer? I don't know many ways to break this verse down. He's pretty much saying, how do you keep living in something that you're now dead to? You died to it. It's no longer there. And if you go down to verse 11 in Romans 6, it goes into the same thing. Likewise, you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin. Reckon yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. I started off with these two verses for a reason. Because to understand what we're talking about and to truly see sin in a different way, we've got to understand what these verses are talking about. And not just understand them, we've got to believe these verses. If I just sit here and just randomly just ask a basic question and said, How many people believe the Bible? Every hand in this room would go up. Every hand in every church in Bacon County this morning would go up. Why? Because they believe the Bible. But then if I looked and said, the Bible says, reckon yourselves dead to sin, which means sin is dead in your life. They would argue with me. And you know what they would say? This would be their comeback. No, brother, we sin every day. Legit comeback, because we do. But what is sin? That's the question. What they're saying is we make mistakes every day. So therefore, I cannot be dead to sin, which therefore makes me say, Did Paul tell a lie? I don't believe Paul lied. I believe we are dead to sin. I believe the problem is that we have a different understanding of sin than what Paul had. Because we still, no doubt we still make mistakes. If you don't, please help the rest of us. Because we all make dumb decisions and dumb mistakes. So it automatically, my brain automatically says, okay, if I know, I still make mistakes every day. But Paul is saying what the word dead to this is no longer exist in us. There's got to be something, I'm missing something here. Am I operating with a wrong definition, or the Paul just told me a lie in the Bible? And I come to the conclusion that I probably was looking at it the wrong way because I don't believe he lied to me. The Bible's very clear. This is just two verses I pulled out because it's right here in Romans and it's close together. There's probably, if I'm not mistaken, there's like six or seven more that relates to this that says that we're dead to sin, that you have died to sin. So the Bible is very, very clear. We died to sin. When Jesus died on the cross and we died with him, that's why we say we co-that we we were co-killed with him. When we died with him, we died to everything. He died and we died to it through him. Okay? So if we really want a better understanding, we have to see what sin is according to the Bible. We have to ask ourselves that little bit difficult question. Have I misinterpreted what this is really saying? There are definitions of sin in the Old Testament that means to miss the mark. That's the number one definition somebody's going to give you when you ask them what's the definition of sin. That is a great definition. I remember having this discussion when I taught on this with a couple of people. That is not a wrong definition. It means the word itself, the Greek word actually comes, actually, it's an archer word. Somebody shooting a boat. And it means like you're shooting at a target. And it means miss the mark. You've got a little, you know, y'all know what a target. You got a big target, but then you got a bullseye. The bullseye is what you're trying to hit. So if you don't hit the bullseye and you hit out here, you hit the target, but you missed your mark. When it's talking about sinning here, it's talking about missing the mark. When I first started teaching on this, I didn't disagree with that definition, but it triggered me to want to go a little bit deeper with it. My first question was this what's the mark? If you tell me I'm missing the mark, I've got to know what the mark is. Because if I want to, if I'm missing it, but therefore I want to come back and hit it, I need to know what the mark is. If it's just bad behavior, then guess what? I'm probably going to continue missing the mark. And you are too. So automatically that got my brain going saying, okay, that that can't be the mark. Just behavior. That can't be it. So I got to study more into it. I got to looking at it a little bit deeper. So that definition of missing the mark is not wrong, but we have to ask the question: what's the mark? What's the mark that we're trying to hit? The word for sin that's used over 90% of the time in the New Testament, it actually changes. In the New Testament, it's the Greek word harmatia. And if you break that word down, it's a compound word from two different Greek words, uh ha mirros. The ha in Greek means distorted. Myros actually means form. So when you put them together, that sin, the new definition, the Greek word for it, means distorted form or distorted image. So what does that mean? By definition, the sin, sin, by definition, means distorted form. Now think about what that means in a minute. Distorted form. That means everything that you were never meant to be. That's why when somebody looks in the mirror and they call themselves just an old sinner, saved by grace. That's a distorted thought. And I'm looking at myself in a distorted way because that is not what I'm called to be. It said he chose me before the foundation of the world. He created me in the image and the likeness of himself. I'm not called and created and purposed to see myself as just a sinner or just somebody who's no good. I'm called to more than that. So if you died to sin, as we just read in the Bible, the Bible said that. If we died to sin, you died to what? A distorted form. Think about that a minute. You died to a distorted form. You died to everything that you were not supposed to be. So everything you were not meant to be, we are not striving and working to try to fix it or to try to improve it. You are literally dead to it, according to Scripture. We could come up with all kinds of things that you could say, well, this don't line up with the word in my life, or this don't line up with the word. That's not who you were created to be. You're dead to that. The question is, can you see yourself that way? Or do you are you gonna continue to look at yourself every day and condemn yourself and beat yourself up? Sin is my primarily an identity issue. It's missing the mark of who we are truly called to be in God or or living out of the distorted image of ourselves. So what about behavior? How does behavior fall in here? Because that's what we are taught. That's why it's so hard to grab on to this. It used to frustrate me when I first started teaching on it because I was like, why is this so hard to understand, you know? And it used to frustrate me. But I understand that because we're taught that it's behavior, behavior, behavior, behavior. And then you say, boom, cut that off, it's distorted form. People can't grab that because we're so used to just thinking behavior. So I think we do have to ask the question where does behavior fall in this? And obviously it's real, as we said a while ago, but it's a symptom of it. It's not the root cause, it's a symptom. If I look at myself and I and I see myself, and in my mind, I see myself as a nobody, I see myself as just an old sinner who's just trying to get by. I see myself as I hear many Christians say all the time, uh that they're not good enough, they're not worthy. We hear people say that, we hear Christians say that. They're just not worthy. If I see myself that way, then I'm gonna act out certain behaviors. They're automatically gonna happen. Because why? Because I see myself. That's the vision I have myself, that I'm a nobody. I'm not I'm not one with Christ, even though the Bible says he's one with me, even though the Bible says that he lives on the inside of me, I still look at myself as less than. And that's not what the Bible teaches. Nowhere in the Bible does it teach me to look at myself that way. So when we start looking at behaviors, behaviors do relate, but they are a symptom of it. If you have a disease and you have something, you have a sickness, you've got certain symptoms that you start displaying. Why? Because of whatever you may have. Whatever you're displaying is not the sickness, it's a symptom of the sickness. It's the same way here. The behaviors that we're seeing people do, the behaviors that we're sometimes doing, is simply coming out of that thought process of who I think I am. So let's think about the most common teaching when it comes to sin that we hear in the church. Many of us grew up hearing sin separates us from God. Am I the only one that ever heard that? Have y'all heard that too? That sin separates you from God. But look at what it says in Romans 8, verse 38 and 39. Again, I'm coming straight with scripture here to debunk this, not my own opinion. It says, For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor death, nor any other created thing, shall it be able to do what? Shall be able to separate us. Okay? It shall not be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. This is another verse that you can try in many ways to turn this thing around and make it mean what you want it to mean, but it's pretty simple. Paul makes a really radical declaration right here. And if Paul is right, and I believe, personally believe he is, if Paul is right, then sin cannot separate you from God. Because he just said nothing can. Nothing. Not life, not death, nothing can separate you from God. So why do we teach so much in church from the pulpit that sin separates you from God? And what it does is it pushes people into a place of being less than what God has called them to be. Thinking of themselves less than what God has created them to be. Making them see themselves in an image that God never created. You know what that means? That means they see themselves in a distorted image. You know what that is? That's sin. Not the behavior, but it's me seeing myself in a way that God never created me to be. That's the sin. That's the problem that we have. So this forces us to ask a question. If sin does not separate us from God, and I believe that. That's why I'm just showing you. I can teach some things, and I don't, I may not go into detail on it, and some people I know I know it can be, they'll be like, what is he talking about? I don't know, I'm not sure if I believe that. And that's fine. But what I'm doing now is I'm taking some of these things that I've taught and I'm showing you scripture to support them. This is where I get up from. I'm not just sitting home coming up with this stuff, I'm actually coming from scripture with it. And I'm basing my belief system off of what scripture's saying. So this forces me to ask a question. If Paul is correct in what he's saying here, that nothing can separate us. That sin cannot separate us from God. If he's correct in saying that, then I have to ask myself this question What does sin really do? What's the purpose of it? Why do we why do we spend 90% of our time in church talking about this? Because most churches spend the majority of their time talking about sin. So can we just say the real issue is is that sin blinds us instead of separating us? It does not separate us from God. It may make you feel distance from God because you're living in a place and you're seeing yourself as somebody that God never created you to be. But God don't leave us. If that's the case, then there's other scriptures that I gotta take it and pull out and say, they lied here too. When he says, I'll never leave you nor forsake you. I live on the inside of you, and I'll never leave you nor forsake you. If I do something of bad behavior, and God says, Oh, but I can't handle that, I gotta come out of there. Then the word lied. I hate to keep using that word, but it but it really did. And I'm at a point right now I'm just saying, okay, either the word is the truth or it's not. And I've got to come to a decision, do I believe it or do I not? I can't say I believe it, but then teach something totally opposite of it, even in church. I can't do that. That's tradition. We're teaching tradition a lot of times, and we're calling it Bible, and we're calling it gospel, and it's nothing more than tradition. I want to teach the gospel, the good news. I want to teach what the Bible actually says and help us get an understanding of what it really means. And that way, every time I make a mistake, and I promise you, I'll make another one today. I usually make at least one a day. How many of y'all make? So next time I make one, I don't beat myself up so bad that I think I gotta run back up here and get saved again. You believe that happens in churches? Every Sunday. Somebody's getting saved again because they messed up Saturday night. They slipped up and was out with the buddies and they drunk a beer. They stumped a toe and said a word they shouldn't have said. Gotta hit the altar Sunday morning. That's the mindset that it gives you. That you have to do that every time. Why? Because when you messed up, God left you. That is nowhere in the Bible. And it I I'll even go further than that, and this is my opinion. It don't even make sense to believe that when you compare it to the Bible. Okay? Everything's got to come back to the Word. So sin doesn't push God away. Now it may blind us to the good news, it may blind us to actually seeing the mercy and the grace and the goodness of God, but it don't push him out. He doesn't wake up and say, Oh, I'm leaving you today because you messed up. What does it do? It pushes me to a place of saying I'm not worthy. And then I can't see God for who he really is because I'm down here soaking in the mud like the prodigal son. And then one day the prodigal son got up and he still had mud all over him, but he said, I don't belong here. I belong in the Father's house. He had an awakening. That no matter how dirty he was, no matter what he had gone through, he still belonged to the Father. That's the awakening that we've got to have. Now, this is not a license just to go out and live however you want to live, and that's what most people think. That's why they don't allow to teach it. Because they think Christians are just so immature that you can't receive this message and still be a good Christian. I believe more in you than that. I believe that you can hear this message and go out and still be a good Christian. I just believe that. So it blinds us from seeing Him and ourselves correctly. Sin distorts identity. Instead of living as sons and daughters like we were created to be, we live as slaves. We live as slaves to fear, we live as slaves to shame and guilt, condemnation. And we see Christian people every single day living like that. I'm not questioning their salvation, I'm not questioning where they're going at the end of time. I'm just saying they're living life now full of fear and guilt and condemnation. Why? Because they don't know their true identity in Christ. Has nothing to do with salvation. When you make this comment and you make these kind of statements, a lot of people don't like it because they automatically think you're judging other people. And you're saying, well, that one's saved and that one ain't saved. Again, nothing to do at all with salvation. It's to do with how are we going to live here on this earth? He put us here for a reason. We're here for a purpose. He said, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth. Stop waiting on heaven to get kingdom. He said, kingdom happens now. So all I want to do is say, How can I live it out right now while I'm here? Think about this. If I sit here today and I and I just put a blindfold on and I sit up here with a blindfold over my eyes, I may not see you. Matter of fact, I would not see you. I have a blindfold on. But it doesn't mean that you're not here. It just means I don't see you. See, we think because we don't see God that He left us. When the fact is, it's my own mindset that has me not seeing Him. It's my own blindness that has me not seeing Him. It ain't got nothing to do with Him moving. He didn't move out. My sin did not cause Him. Another thing in the Bible, I don't want to get on this today, but it starts with the cross when we have this teaching that God had to turn away because He couldn't see sin on the cross when Jesus was on the cross. Study that out. I'll just leave it like this. That is not even, that is not what it's saying. That is not what it's saying. God does not turn away from sin. He does not turn away from you and me because we make a bad mistake. He loves us. He's there to restore us. He's there to redeem us. He's there to reconcile us, which he's already done. He has reconciled us. He has called us back into relationship. The messing up part of it that we're so caught up on, that's what happened in Adam. You had nothing to do with Adam. Jesus came after Adam, climbed on a cross and said, I'm redeeming you. I'm reconciling you. God said, I was in Christ reconciling the world back. Remember that word reconcile means bring back into relationship. He was reconciling all of us back into relationship with him. He didn't ask your opinion. He didn't come to you and say, Is it okay if I do this? He said, I love you so much because you're my child. I care about you. And I'm going to do this for you. I'm going to send my son to the cross to reconcile everybody back. And he did it. But there's limitations to this right or wrong thinking. And this is the message that we're teaching so many people is right or wrong, right or wrong. That's it. But there's limitations to it. It hurts people, it puts people in a in a in a really tough mindset. If sin is only about behavior, then the solution is always do better and try harder. It comes down to me. I forget about what he's done already, and I start trying to put forth more effort. I start trying to put forth more work into it. And it becomes about what I do rather than what he did. That's religion. That's what that's when I say I don't like religion, I hate religion, I hate religion. Religion is man-made. Religion is when we try to take the place and add on to what Jesus has already completed. That's religion. That's not what this is about. That's what sin, I mean right and wrong mindset will teach you is that it's about what you did and what you did and what you did. It's not what it's about. It's about what he did. And now it's about me waking up and realizing what he did for me. The gospel is not about self-improvement, as much as we like to teach that. It's about revelation of who we already are in Christ. That's the good news. The good news is not one day I can be saved. One day I can be redeemed. One day I'll get to heaven. That's not good news. The good news is he's already climbed on the cross and he said it's finished. And everything that we're hoping to get one day, we have access to right now because of Jesus Christ. That's the good news that it's done. It's actually complete. So right and wrong thinking keeps us on the surface. But Jesus wants to deal with the root. He wants to deal with some of the deeper stuff, the blindness that we have sometimes. I use the blindfold because that's kind of what I think of, and it's a simple way to understand it. Kind of like we got a blindfold on sometimes. We're blinded to the truth. So Jesus wants to help us take this blindfold off. He wants to help us see again. He wants to help us see everything that He created us to be. That's why many times I've had people tell me, you know, that some things I say from a pulpit seems arrogant and seems wrong when I say I really don't care what you think about me. I don't mean that arrogantly. I mean that what matters is what Jesus done for me, not what you think about me. Because I guarantee there's people out there that's got some really negative opinions of me. And if I live my life based on what they think of me, it ain't gonna go well. So that's what I mean by I don't really, what they think don't matter. What they think about you shouldn't matter. What Christ did is what should matter. And he's trying, and we are trying by this teaching to take the blindfold off and let people see again. Again, the right and wrong thinking keeps us on that surface. Let Jesus go deeper. Let him go deeper, let him get to the root, the blindness, the brokenness, the false identity. That's what we're trying to do. Because those things are the root and they feed the behaviors. You want the behaviors to stop? Get the other stuff in check. Understand your identity in Christ. Know who you are. Understand that you're already forgiven. You're already redeemed. It's a finished word. When you begin to understand that, that changes on the inside of me. And when it changes on the inside and I grab onto it and I truly start believing it, now it begins to affect the things out here. Why? Because I live differently, I think differently, I walk differently, I speak differently. And it's an inward out change. We trying to just focus on telling everybody stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. We're trying to fix it out there and in hopes that if they fix it out there and clean it up, then it'll fix in here. We're doing it backwards. The church has done it backwards for a long time. And I'm not making that statement to come across as I know more than any other pastor. I'm not, that is not it at all. There's a lot of people teaching this. Not a lot of people around here yet teaching this. Because we're we're South Georgia, we're Bible Belt. We're a lot of Southern Baptists, a lot of, you know, tradition. A lot of people go to certain churches simply because mama and daddy and granddaddy and grandma went there and granddaddy built the church. You know, that's just the truth to it. Nothing wrong with that, but that's a lot of tradition that gets put in there. And we learn the same things passed down from generation to generation. And we don't even question whether it's biblical. We just believe it. Because so-and-so said it. All I'm saying is let's wake up, take the blindfolds off, and let's have an open mind and question it. That's not rude to question things. Yeah. Get a great lot of understanding by questioning it. So it's not rude. It's not, I'm not disrespecting my spiritual fathers who come before me because I question things. There's things I was taught that was not, does not line up with what I believe today. I don't look at Pastor Dell or Pastor Don as any less because they taught me that. I just look at it as I've grown, I've matured, I've got to a different place now. Thankful for what they give me, but now I'm going from there. So we can keep teaching surface level, or we can go deeper to, I believe, what I call greater truth. And that greater truth is simple. Nothing can separate us from God, according to the scripture. Sin affects fellowship. It does. Because if I look down on myself and I don't feel like I'm worthy and I don't want to walk into a church building because I look at all y'all as just good Christians and I don't feel that way, it will affect fellowship. I will not come into fellowship with people like that because I feel I'm not worthy to be around them. Come on now, we've all dealt with this. It affects fellowship, but it does not affect the union with the Father. It doesn't have anything to do with that. Sin affects clarity, but it does not affect covenant. I'm talking about clarity of how I see myself. It can affect the way I see myself, but it does not affect the covenant that I entered into because of what Jesus finished on the cross. Sin affects how we walk, it affects how we speak, it affects how we feel, but not whose children we are. It don't change. We're still God's. When I was yet a sinner, he accepted me. He chose me before the foundation of the world. Have you ever thought about this? I know this sounds really dumb. He chose me before the foundation of the world. I wasn't born yet. He chose me before that. He chose you before you had an opportunity to mess it up. He chose you. That'll mess with your mind a little bit. But it just shows his goodness. We think that is what we do. If I'm good, he's with me. If I'm bad, he's leaving me. He chose you before you had the chance to be bad. So our mindset has to shift. The cross dealt with separation once and for all. That's what the scripture says, once and for all. It is finished. The Spirit's work now is opening our eyes to see what's already true. That's what this teaching is. That's what the finished work of theology teaches. Is it tries to get us to open our eyes up to the fact that when he said it's finished, he actually told the truth on that. He said it's finished. He went to be with the Father. And he sat down at the Father, at the right hand of the Father. We are united with him, even in our mess. What if I make a mistake today? What if I do something wrong? You're still united with him. You're still joined together with him. I always give that stupid little example, but it just makes sense to me. You put sugar in the tea. You can't, if your guest comes over and says, I don't drink sweet tea, you can't take the sugar back out. It's already mixed together. You just got to go in there and boil some more tea. He's in you. He's joined together. He's become one with you. And do you really think that something you do is gonna make him say, Oh, gotta leave its place? He's already chose you. So here's the challenge. Ready to close. Here's the challenge. We can ask ourselves two different questions. Is my behavior right or wrong? And we can focus and look at our lives from a right or wrong perspective. Or we can ask the deeper question. Am I clearly seeing who God is and seeing who I am through Him? That's two different questions to look at. That's two totally different ends of the spectrum. Over here I'm focused on behavior. Over here, I'm focused on identity. That changes things. I want to focus on identity. I don't want to focus on messing up and doing things wrong. What if sin is not the thing keeping God away from you? But the thing keeping you away from yourself. What if sin is keeping you away from yourself, your true identity, and your God-given purpose? I've already said it's not keeping you away from God, so we can we can strike that one out. But it can keep you away from your identity of who you are in Christ. It can make you look at yourself less than. Nothing. He said it, nothing separates us. The challenge of faith is to stop living as if separation even exists. If I truly get it in my heart and in my mind that I cannot be separated from God, that changes everything. The way I read scripture will change if my mindset is He's not going to abandon me. He's not leaving me. He is one with me, and we are joined together in union as one. If that is the mindset that I take every day, I'm telling you, you'll walk differently. You'll think different. You'll talk different. Everything changes. Sin may blur our vision sometimes and warp our warp our sense of self. But it can't undo what Christ has already completed. It's a finished work. Your redemption, identity, your worth in Him, it remains fully intact even if you make a mistake. Let me close with this. This is important. I know a lot of times when we say we'll get ready to close, people kind of get ready and start shutting us out. This is important right here. Listen to this. Because I believe that there may be some people in here thinking this right now, or if somebody goes online and don't come to this church and they listen to this, they're going to be thinking, asking this question. If this is true, if what we're teaching, what I'm saying is true, then why don't we hear more people teaching it? If it's truly the Bible, if this is the gospel, then why are we not hearing more people teach this? That's a fair question. Get online and really research, you will see Kim's been on. She knows there's a lot more people teaching this kind of stuff. Other people's, you know, it's online a lot, and they they know this. But I'm saying locally there's not as many. So why? And I believe there's a reason for it. I believe there's several reasons for it. For centuries, most churches have framed sin in legalistic terms. Uh right, wrong, uh, commandments kept versus commandments broken. This is because it's easy to teach and understand. I mean, think about how easy it is to teach. If you do X, you're sinning. You do Y, you're blessed. And God's pleased with you, you're righteous. That's that's pretty simple. Which one are you gonna do? Keeps it simple. Seeing sin as more than a behavior, as a distortion of our God-given identity, this is a perspective that requires careful study. It really does. It requires a little bit more than just it requires you to study a little bit. It requires you to reflect on some things, it requires you to ask some challenging questions. And not everyone's willing or comfortable in doing that. I am, I love it. But not everyone is. And we understand that. From a pastoral standpoint, there's also a fear that when you teach this, that people will misunderstand what you're saying. Some pastors are worried that if you say sin doesn't separate us from God, the people's just gonna go out and live how they want to live and do whatever they want to do. That's the concern from a pastoral standpoint. Explaining sin as a distorted image and missing the mark of our identity in Christ takes careful thought. It really does. Because it challenges us. Listen at this now, this is this is awesome right here. It challenges us to hold together both our freedom in Christ and our responsibility to live it out. It don't do away with the freedom. We still have the freedom in Christ. Listen, you can go out of this building today and do anything you want to do. Is it gonna be pleasing to God? Might not. But that's the freedom you have. But when you understand your identity, it changes some of the things that you want to do. It really does. I'm mature enough, I believe you are mature enough to know that I have that freedom, but I don't have to act on it. I have the freedom to drive however fast I want to drive, but also understand there's consequences to it. But I can do it. It don't make people have that. It will make immature people. Immature people need a right or a wrong. Boom, boom. It's this or it's this. There's guidelines. That's that's that's like a guardrail. You can do this, but don't cross this line. They need that. And I don't mean that negative, I'm just saying if people's immature, they need that. A child needs that. What do we do as parents? We give guidance to a child. You're not going to tell a two-year-old to go outside and play by the road. It's okay. No, because that child don't understand these cars coming by 70 miles an hour. Why? We guard them. Why? Because they're immature. They're children. You know, there's immature spiritual children too. And they need those guardrails. But as we mature, we should take the training wheels off. And we should dig deeper, and we should be willing to ask some questions that I wasn't asking before. Just another way to look at it. Last one right here, or last two. There's the theological emphasis to it and a congregational emphasis. I want to hit on both of those real quick. Theological, many traditions emphasize atonement as a transaction. What does that mean? God will forgive your sin. If you repent, he'll forgive you. If you confess, he'll forgive you. If you obey, he'll forgive you. It's a transaction. If you do this, then God will do this. That's a transaction. That means if I give you money, you give me whatever I'm buying. That's a transaction. That's the way the church has taught this for centuries as a transaction. The finished work, inclusion theology, emphasizes union. We're one. It emphasizes restoration instead of punishment and separation. Because this is less common. Why is this? Is it just because that pastor's immature? Is it just because that pastor don't know? It's because the pastor that went to seminary, this ain't taught in seminaries. I can tell you, finished work. A lot of this is not taught in seminaries. And I can tell you from pastors who said, I went to seminary, I didn't go to seminary. But the pastors who went to seminary and now are understanding this are saying, I didn't learn that in school. They didn't teach me that in school. So this is because it's not taught in seminaries. These pastors are going to school and they're coming out and they're teaching what? What they was taught in seminary. And if this wasn't taught, then they're not teaching it. Pastors aren't familiar with teaching sin as identity distortion or as something that's already addressed by Christ. It's taught that one day, one day it'll happen, one day all this stuff will happen. It's taught as futuristic. The last thing, and this is where I want to compliment you guys. Because I believe, and I really do mean this. I believe we have a church that is, and I want this is the words I put, congregational readiness. Is a congregation ready to hear some of this? Their son was not. I can't go in teaching this because the congregation may not be ready for it. I believe this house is. I really do. Teaching sin as distorted image requires people to understand two things. That you are fully, already fully united with God in Christ. You have to understand that. And that sin is primarily a blindness to identity. It's not a behavior, and it does not separate us from God. When you understand those two things, that gets you ready to receive this. Because if you're still looking at sin as behavior, then everything I'm saying today really ain't gonna make no sense to you. I'm glad you're here. Please come back, but it's not gonna make much sense to you. I believe we have a congregation that has opened their minds up. I'm not saying you agree with everything I say. I can look at some of your faces sometimes and tell you don't agree. And that's okay. But at least you're willing, you're keep coming and you're here, and you've got an open mind to at least say, okay, I'm I'm willing to be stretched a little bit. I'm willing to think this through a little bit. And if you don't agree, cool. It ain't gonna change anything. And many congregations are comfortable with sin as just breaking rules, uh, which is simple and immediate. You broke a rule, boom, here's a punishment. How simple is that? If you break a rule, there's a fine or there's a punishment. That's pretty simple. Teaching identity restoration challenges people to think differently. It challenges people to think about themselves in a different way and to truly think about the gospel in a different way. Teaching sin as identity distortion is it's it's more abstract. It's a lot bigger. It's harder to illustrate sometimes. And it risks, there's a lot of risk in teaching this. It really is. It risks challenging long-held assumptions that people's always held on to. This has always been the gospel to me. And the hardest thing in what we're doing right now is truly letting go of some of the stuff that I've always been taught. And realizing that although I always held on to that and I thought it was the gospel, when I come to the understanding and the realization that it really wasn't, it was just more something I believed and it was more tradition, so therefore I've got to kind of let go of it a little bit. That's hard to do. That's really hard to do. But it's something that's necessary. Because if I'm going to grab onto something different, then I can't keep holding on to something that contradicts it. I've got to let go of some things. The finished work, inclusion, it views, it views things a little bit differently. It requires bold theological reframing. I have to reframe the way I see the Bible. I have to reframe the way I'm gonna look at the Word of God. I have to re-examine even verses that I thought I knew what they meant. Now I have to look at a Greek word and say, wait a minute now. This was written in Greek. So it don't mean the same thing as 21st century English. I can't apply the same meaning to it. I truly have to go back and look at some words and say, what was the Greek word and what was the Greek meaning of it? People that lived in that time didn't have any problem understanding it because they lived in that time. But today we have a hard time. Why? Because we don't speak that language. We don't understand what some of that meant. So that's what I mean by you got to be willing to go a little deeper. I ain't saying you've got to go and go back to college and study Greek. But heck, we had the internet today. Anybody can get online and say, what's the Greek word of sin? You know, anybody can do that. And it'll give you the definition and everything. So sometimes we need to re-examine what we've been taught. Even the things that we've believed to be the gospel. It can be uncomfortable, it can be challenging, but wrestling with these truths can open us up to a deeper understanding. And I think it's going to take us to a much better place. It's a deeper understanding of God's love. It's a deeper understanding of what Christ actually done, what he completed, and it's a deeper understanding of my true identity in Christ. I don't focus on the same stuff that I used to focus on anymore. I don't disregard sin. I just understand that it's not that there there's something deeper to it. And it's the deeper thing that I need to focus on, not not the sin itself.