God won’t give you more than you can handle? [False ideas Christians believe about…difficulty. Part 1]

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If you’ve ever been going through a really difficulty time, you may have heard one of the following statements:

  • God won’t give you more than you can handle.
  • God helps those who help themselves.
  • During times of suffering, you’ll be closer to God.
  • This, too, shall pass.

We hear them regularly, don’t we?  We interact with people going through hard times, and often we struggle to make sense of it.  Where is God in the midst of my pain?  Will I make it through?  What do we say to people who are struggling?  We want to be there for them, we want to encourage them, but we are concerned that we are going to say the wrong thing.  It’s easy to fall back on sayings that we’ve heard before, maybe that were said to us during our pain, and we hope that we will sound wise and helpful.  In those confusing moments, what often comes out of our mouths?  One of these statements! 

But are they true?  Or are they false?  Let’s fact check them. This post starts the third week in a sermon series I’m preaching at Faith Church on false ideas Christians believe. We’ve covered sin and the Bible, and now we’re fact-checking statements about dealing with difficulty.

First up is “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” Are there any Bible verses that might prove or disprove this?  How about 1 Corinthians 10:13?

On the surface, this seems to be a verse that proves the statement definitively.  But a closer look reveals that this verse is not about difficult times, but about temptation. 

But, Paul says here, “There is no temptation so powerful that it has the ability to overpower us to the point where we are incapable of resisting it.  God is faithful.  He will provide a way for us to stand up under it.” 

And yet some of us have faced incredibly difficult temptations that have overwhelmed us. Is the verse wrong? No, the verse is right. God is faithful. When we succumb to temptation, James 1, tells us it is because we choose to indulge the temptation: “When tempted, no one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

So maybe the phrase is wrong? Let’s examine it. It starts with “God won’t give.” Taken by itself, it describes God as doing the giving.  Is that what God does?  Go around giving people trouble?  Hardship?  Pain? 

I know it says, “He won’t give you more than you can handle,” but that presumes that God does give in the first place, and the context of the phrase is difficulty, so does God give us difficulty? 

The image we get when we use this phrase is of a person walking carefree down the sidewalk, and enjoying a nice sunny spring day, and all of a sudden God pops up and says, “Oh hey, I am giving you this box to carry.”  Could be a box of bad health, or a box of job loss, or a box of broken dishwasher.  You name your pain.  The person holds the box, and it is heavy.  They don’t want to be carrying it.  But God gave it to them.  And then God shows up again and gives them another box.  More pain. More difficulty.  And now they are struggling.   With one box, it was bad, but manageable.  Now with two boxes, whew…it is really taking its toll.  And then God shows up again.  A third box.  The hits just keep on coming.  Now the pain in tripled and overwhelming.  They won’t make it much further.  God shows up again and gives them a fourth box.  They fall down unable to handle it, the boxes of pain crashing over them, doing them in

Is God a giver of pain like that?  No!  We read Jesus saying that God is a giver of good gifts in Matthew 7:9-11, and James says the same thing in James 1:13-17.

So where does all the trouble and difficulty come from?  Many places.  Our own bad choices can result in pain, other people making bad choices affect us, and the broken and fallen world we live in.  There is also a biblical concept that God punishes, or disciplines or corrects those he loves.  Is that how God gives out difficulty to us?  That he is punishing us?  Is all our pain actually punishment?

The phrase came up in our Deuteronomy study in chapter 8.  It is in more than one of the Psalms, and Proverbs 3:12 and which is quoted in Hebrews 12:6.  It’s also mentioned in Revelation. 

These passages describe God’s correction as very different from the many difficulties we face in life.  God is not looking around just randomly punishing people, saying “I love them so much.”  Instead, punishment occurs after a disobedience, and for the most part, that punishment is God lovingly allowing us to face the consequences of our bad choice.  But know this, in our pain, he is right there with us. 

So as we fact-check the first part of that statement, I say it is totally false.  We need to see God as the giver of good gifts, as the parent who loves us, and thus allows us to go through the consequences of our bad choices, but who never leaves us.  Therefore God is not deciding who can handle difficulty and then doling out bad circumstances based on that. Check back in for part 2 where we fact-check the second half of the phrase: “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

Practical suggestions for reading the Bible [False ideas Christians believe about…the Bible. Part 5]


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Did you know that a billionaire guy in England has built an amazing state of the art chocolate factory?  His chocolate is known for its astoundingly creamy taste, and he attributes this to his unique manufacturing process.  No other chocolate factory has anything like it.  It is a chocolate river that ends up in a waterfall, so I guess you would call it a chocolate fall.  The churning of the chocolate as it crashes to the bottom of the chocolate fall creates its unparalleled creamy taste.  As you can imagine his process is top-secret, and no one is allowed in there so they don’t steal his method.  But in a genius marketing move, he decided to send out a handful of golden tickets hidden in random chocolate bars, distributed around the world.  The people who discovered the golden tickets were going to be treated to a special all-access behind the scenes tour of the chocolate factory. 

Let me pause the story right there and ask: Am I telling truth? 

Nope.  Not one bit of it.  It is a completely false story.  And yet, my guess is that a whole bunch of you know exactly what I’m talking about.  What story is this?

Did you guess Charlie and Chocolate Factory, which features the factory owner, Willy Wonka?  It was first a book, and more recently has been turned into movies.  Here’s the thing.  While that story is based in reality, we all know it is fiction.  Yet none of us is concerned about that.  We’re used to that.  In fact, we know that Roald Dahl, who is the author of that story, had a reason, or an intent, trying to communicate something to us.  He was using literature to teach a lesson. 

If you have read the book or seen the movie, what would you say is the lesson?  “Don’t be selfish,” maybe? 

What this reminds us of is that we need to understand genre!  We need to see that even fiction literature can be used to teach a lesson. Jesus did this in his parables.  He created stories about realistic things, but to teach a lesson.

In other words, we do not need to read the Bible with hyper-literalistic precision in order to keep the Bible pure, and to keep our faith in God.  Instead, ask: “What was the author’s intent?  What can I learn about God’s heart from this?  What should I do with that information in my life now?” 

I believe that the Bible is truth.  We can read the Bible and learn what God and the human author were trying to teach us. It is one very important way God lovingly communicates to us about the way of his Kingdom.

Therefore, I conclude this series with some other important points to keep in mind.

First, every time you are about to study Scripture, whether publicly or in private, remember what the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2, that we have the promise of the Spirit’s guidance.  Pray for God’s Spirit to help you understand what you are reading.

Next, before you seek to apply Scripture to your own life, try to understand how the original audience would have understood it.  This is what we saw many times in the Deuteronomy study.  That means identifying the genre you are reading. It will also mean having an awareness of the historical and cultural situation of the original audience.

Learning genre and what a passage meant to the original audience might require you to get help.  There are plentiful resources you could turn to, but one that I have found very accessible and helpful is The Bible Project. They have created artistically gorgeous and biblically rich videos that will help you learn genre and historical context of each book of the Bible. 

Next, seek the principle in the passage that could relate to all time periods and cultures. Then with that principle in hand, test the principle by asking “does this fit with the teaching of the many books of the Bible?” 

For example, if you are reading Psalm 1, you could conclude that the principle is “don’t make friends with sinners.”  But when you cross-check that with the rest of the Bible, you realize that Jesus made friends with sinners, so maybe there is another way to look at Psalm 1. 

Once you have the principle in hand, then you can apply it to your life. As James says, “do not just be hearers of the Word, do what it says.” Back to Psalm 1, we could amend the principle to “be on guard against falling into temptation by regularly immersing yourself in the teaching of God’s word.” We can then apply that to our lives by creating a plan for consistent study of the Bible, and even doing so with others to add encouragement and accountability, working together to understand and apply God’s Kingdom ways to our lives.

Examining the literal approach to reading the Bible [False ideas Christians believe about…the Bible. Part 4]

Did you ever hear the phrase that we need to read the Bible literally? In part 3 of this series we saw that a literal reading of some parts of the Bible leads to very bizarre results. Maybe the concept of reading the Bible literally should mean something else?

Take Jesus.  Jesus was a master of creating stories to teach principles.  We call them parables.  Some literalists will say that Jesus was telling true stories.  But that viewpoint is absolutely unnecessary, and in some cases odd, when you look at the details of the stories Jesus told.  Some of the details are purposefully exaggerated or fictional or even impossible.

For example, Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus, and how the rich man went to hell and Lazarus when to heaven with Abraham, and get this, they could see each other.  Can you see from heaven into hell?  The literalists say, “Yes, because that is the precise detail that Jesus mentioned.”  But nowhere else in biblical descriptions of heaven and hell is there anything like this.  So it is much more likely that Jesus was teaching an important principle through a story.

And that is okay.  We tell stories like this all time.  Fairy tales and fables.  No one believes Star Wars is real, but that doesn’t matter.  Even though every Star Wars film begins with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” those movies are not about real historical events. What’s more, the author doesn’t want us to believe it is real.  Instead, the author creates a fictional story through which we can still learn about good and evil.  This happens frequently in literature and film, and we have no problem with that.

The Bible, too, has many such fictional stories. 

“But, Joel,” you might say, “that is a slippery slope. What about the story of creation in Genesis 1-3, or the stories of Job and Jonah.  Are you saying these parables?  Don’t they have to be history?”  Some say that unless we believe in the historical viability of every single story in the Bible, then we are going down a slippery slope that will lead to throwing the whole Bible in the trash.  That’s why some people feel way more comfortable saying that it is best to just read the whole Bible literally.  It can be hard work doing the research and investigation to determine if a particular part of the Bible is fiction or non-fiction.  I submit to you, however, that doing the work is worth it.  Not just a little bit worth it either. It is preeminently important because if God, inspiring human authors, meant for a particular part or book of Scripture to be fiction, then we should want to know that.  We do not need to be afraid of that.

Take Jonah.  I know that in our church there are actually disagreements about the genre of Jonah.  Some think Jonah is history.  Some think it is parable.  There is good biblical evidence for each. 

Here’s what I tell people in the end:  This is not a question of God’s power.   Can God make a big fish swallow a guy, keep that guy alive for 3 days inside the fish, and then spit him out?  If we believe in the resurrection of Jesus, then we have to believe in the power of God to do everything described in Jonah.  No question there.  God could easily have done it.

But did God do it?  This gets to the question of whether the story of Jonah is history or parable? While there is evidence for both sides of the argument, we have to admit that we may never definitely know.

Either way, parable or history, we can still learn the same things about God and his heart!  That takes us back to the question:  What is the author trying to say?  What does God want us to know through the story of Jonah? God can communicate what he wants using either fiction or non-fiction. So let us do the work of looking at the evidence, weighing the options, but ultimately seeking for God’s heart in the process. That is an important method for reading the Bible. Next in part 5 of this series, we’ll look at more important methods for reading the Bible.

How genre is vital to the Bible [False ideas Christians believe about…the Bible. Part 3]

We read the instruction manual for our car differently than we will read Shakespeare’s sonnets, right?  We read the Declaration of Independence different than we read Huckleberry Finn.  As we should.  The authors of each of those documents are utilizing different literary genres to accomplish a purpose. 

Genre is a fancy word that just means “category.”  It is often used to describe different kinds of literature or movies or music.  The Bible, too, includes poetry, lists, history, law codes, letters, parable, prophecies, and more.  Therefore, one of the first things we should do when we start reading something in the Bible is ask, what genre am I reading? 

That goes back to what we already said when we discussed inspiration: the author of each books in the Bible is actually two authors, a combination of God and humans.  God inspired humans to write, so both are the author.  Thus we ask what did God and the human author try to communicate to us?  One of the first steps to determining the message of the text is to answer another question: what literature category or genre did they use to try to communicate?

We are so used to asking and answering this question that we do it without thinking.  You do it all the time. 

When you pull out your car’s owner’s manual, you are in information mode.  You brain automatically assesses that this an instruction manual, and therefore you aren’t going to treat it like poetry. 

Think about it.  Imagine trying to read your car owner’s manual using the principles that we would use for reading poetry!  It would go like this: “The spare tire is located in a hidden compartment in the trunk?  Hmmmm…That must have a double-meaning and Honda is trying to tell me something…but I’m so bad at figuring out this stuff…why don’t they just speak plainly???”  Uh…no…all that manual is trying to say is that there is actually a spare tire hidden in a compartment in the trunk. 

Likewise when I am reading the Psalms in the Bible, I am reading a collection of poetry.  If I want to understand what God and the human author are trying to communicate, I will need to read each psalm like I read poetry because God and the human author used the principles of poetic writing to create the psalms. 

And that brings us to the idea of taking the Bible literally.  Remember our second phrase that we are fact-checking?  “If everything in the Bible is not literally true, the whole thing falls apart.”

What people mean when they say that the Bible is 100% literally true is that it is actually inspired by God.  This is where we would differ with other religions who say that their holy books are also from God.  We believe that only the Bible is divinely inspired.  Therefore the Bible is trustworthy as teaching God’s truth. 

That is not to say that other holy books or movies or songs only and always teach lies.  If a book or song includes the teaching, “Love everyone,” we Christians can affirm that as truth, because it is consistent with the teaching in the Bible.  If another book or movie or song taught something like, “it is okay to hate people who are jerks” then we would disagree with that, because it is not consistent with the teaching in the Bible.  In other words, we believe the Bible is a foundation for truth.

But where this statement gets messy and needs to be fact-checked is when people don’t pay attention to genre.  Let’s look at a very specific example from the Bible to show you what I mean. Take a look at this picture.

How do you feel about this picture?  That the person is attractive?  Beautiful?  Or that it is really weird? 

What you are looking at is a literal artistic rendering of the woman described in the Bible in the book called the Song of Solomon.  This is what you get if the writer is describing this woman literally.  Her neck is a tower.  Her hair is a flock of goats.  Her temples are slices of pomegranate. 

Literalists will say that all Scripture needs to be read on that kind of level.  “Literal,” to them, means that these poets in the Song of Solomon are describing each other exactly as they saw it, with precision, almost scientific precision.

Did the author of Song of Solomon know an actual person like this?  A freaks of nature?  Or should a literal reading the Bible mean something else? Check back in to part 4, as we’ll tackle that question.

What is the Bible? [False ideas Christians believe about…the Bible. Part 2]

What is the Bible?

“Well, that’s obvious, Joel,” you might say, “the Bible is the Word of God.” 

Yes, that is the obvious answer, but it is not enough.  It is true that the Bible is the Word of God, but it also needs some explanation that we don’t normally think about.  As we saw in part 1 of this series fact-checking our beliefs about the Bible, there is another Word of God more ancient than the Bible. So how is the Bible also the Word of God?

Let me illustrate by asking another question: Where did the Bible come from?  Did it just drop out of sky, like a miraculous gift from God?

We Christians do not believe anything like that.  We have a very different belief about the Bible.  What is the Bible?

The Bible is actually not one book.  It is a library of books, written over a long period of time by many different people, all inspired by God. 

We Protestants believe that there are 66 books in the library we call the Bible, and those books were written by about 40 different people, over a period of what might be 1400 years. 

That’s quite a different image than a book just dropping out of the sky.  We do, however, believe God was very much involved.  Those human authors were inspired by God.  So what does it mean that they were inspired by God? 

Let’s look at some passages from the Bible that talk about this.

In 2 Peter 1:19-21, we read “Men spoke from God, as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”  So the writing of the Bible was not a human-only thing.  And it was also not a God-only creation. In the original language the word “carried along” is another one of those word pictures: the biblical writers were moved just like wind filling a sail.

This concept is very much reflected in 2 Timothy 3:16 where the Apostle Paul writes, “All Scripture is God-breathed.”

These two verses describe the miraculous and mysterious process of inspiration.  It is a process where we believe that God was at work, communicating along with the unique perspectives, skills, experiences, languages and customs of the human writers.  This is very different from saying that a writer of songs was inspired.  Right now, for example, my favorite song is “No Longer Slaves.” I find it to be powerful, and I want to listen to it every day, multiple times each day.  I would say the writers of the song are inspired! But they are not inspired like the Bible is inspired.  We Christians believe that the Bible is unique in that God was involved in helping the human writers as they wrote.  He didn’t overpower them to the point where they became robots, shutting off their minds.  He worked with them.  It was a wonderful combination of creator and created working together to create something new. 

What we see, then, is that the Bible is a library of books, written by many different people over a period over a period of many years, inspired by God.  So when we say that the Bible is the Word of God, that’s what we mean, that God inspired human authors to write the various books.  In other words it is also very appropriate to say that the Bible is also the word of people.  Real people. 

We should never say that the Bible is only written by people, and we should never say that it is only written by God.  That’s why we fact-check the statement, “the Bible is the Word of God,” because there is more to the story…people were involved. And one of the most important ways that the human writers included their own personalities and interests was something called genre. We’ll look at how important genre is next in part 3.

The Bible is not the only Word of God [False ideas Christians believe about…the Bible. Part 1]

Image result for bible with magnifying glass

Did you know there is another more ancient Word of God than the Bible? Keep reading to learn about it. Last week I started a series in which I am looking at common sayings Christians use and believe, thinking those sayings are biblical, but they are actually false, not in the Bible.  OR the sayings are partially false, perhaps needing more explanation.

We started by fact-checking common statements about the topic of sin.   Statements like, “All sins are the same,” or it’s opposite: “All sins are not equal.”  And then the famous phrase, “love the sinner, hate the sin.”  None of these are in the Bible, thought we found while all the phrases are based in biblical teaching, they needed explanation to avoid confusion. 

In this week’s series of posts we are fact-checking what we believe about the Bible itself.  Here are the statements, and you might be surprised that I would say we need to fact-check them:

  • If everything in the Bible is not literally true, the whole thing falls apart.
  • The Bible is the Word of God.

Looking at those two statements are you wondering what could possibly be wrong about them?  They seem totally true, right?  Maybe, maybe not.  So let’s fact check what we believe about the Bible!

First of all, we Christians believe that there is another Word of God. The Bible is not the only word of God.  Did you know that?  In fact, the Bible itself tells us that there is another Word of God.  Turn to John 1 and read the first couple verses.

What do we see there?

The Word was God, and was with God in the beginning?  What is this Word John is talking about here?  Jump ahead to verse 14.  The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us?  When John refers to “the Word,” he is not talking about a book containing God’s written word.  In the Old Testament, when an author mentions “God’s Word” they sometimes do refer to the written word, like the Law of Moses we studied in the Deuteronomy series.  But even in the OT, there is so much more to the concept of God’s Word than the written word.  God’s Word is creative, it is powerful, it is not just speech, it is truth, and thus it is intimately bound up in who he is.  God’s Word is so much more than just voice or language.  Think about what happens in Genesis chapter 1 which sounds an awful lot like what we just read in John 1, doesn’t it?  “In the Beginning…”  In Genesis 1, in the beginning. God creates through the power of his word. 

In John 1, we learn more about that Word.  Specifically, we learn that Word is Jesus.  Furthermore John says Jesus is full of grace and truth.  So We Christians have this unique belief.  We believe that truth is not ultimately bound up in statements written in human language in a book.  Instead we believe Truth is a person, named Jesus. 

That is the first step to fact-checking the idea that the Bible is the Word of God.  We need to remember that Jesus is the Word of God. 

But you might say, “Yeah, but isn’t the Bible also the word of God?”  We do call it that, but it is certainly not the Word of God in the same way that Jesus is.  Not even close.  Here’s an example of what I mean.  The earliest Christians did not have Bibles.  The New Testament wasn’t written yet when the church got its start.  Copies of the books of the Old Testament were so expensive that the common person could never dream of owning even just one book of the Old Testament.  So think about that.  The first Christians didn’t have Bibles.  The Bible is so central to our expression of our faith that we might think there is no way the early church could have survived without it.  The reality is that they thrived.  

Why?  Because they still had the Word of God, Jesus.  That should help us put into proper perspective what we are all about as Christians.  We are Jesus-followers. 

But maybe now you’re thinking, “OK, I get that, but isn’t the Bible still really important?”  Good question. 

Let me answer that by asking you a question, “What is the Bible?”  You say, “Well, that’s obvious, Joel, the Bible is the Word of God.” 

Yes, that is the obvious answer, but it is also not enough.  It is true that the Bible is the Word of God, but it also needs some explanation that we don’t normally think about.  Let me illustrate with a question: Where did the Bible come from?  Did it just drop out of sky, like a miraculous gift from God? Check back in to part 2 of this series, as I’ll seek to answer that question!

Love the sinner, hate the sin? [False ideas Christians believe about…Sin. Part 5]

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Have you ever heard a Christian say, “love the sinner, hate the sin”?  We hear that all the time.  Maybe you’ve said it yourself. On the surface it sounds really good.  We should be a people that love others no matter who they are.  What could be wrong with that?  If that was all it was, focusing on love, then there would be nothing wrong with this phrase.  It would all just be love, and we would be showering love on people. 

The problem enters with that word “hate.”  Here’s why.  I’m not saying that we should be OK with or approving of sin.  I’ll get to that in a minute. 

Unless it was a once and done slip up, which often times is not the case, a person’s sin is usually inextricably bound up in who they are.  So when we say, “hate the sin” what they actually hear is “you hate me.”  It doesn’t matter that we also said, love the sinner.  They hear “you hate me”. 

Also, notice the “love the sinner” part. Both parts of this phrase are exceedingly negative and confrontational.  The “hate the sin” part can easily be heard as “you hate me” and then the “love the sinner” part can easily be heard as “you are defining me as a sinner.” 

Is that the message of Jesus to people?  “You hate me and you are defining me as a sinner”? 

Now you may be thinking, “but that is not at all what we mean when say ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’.”  We actually mean something totally positive and encouraging.  I mean, that word “Love” is front and center, right?

But have you ever been on the receiving end of the comment?  Think about it.  Put yourself in the shoes of a person who is being told that comment about themselves.  It might not be so easy to take.  We always hear the negative way more than the positive.  We fixate on the negative.  That’s why it is said that for every negative comment you should say 10 positive statements to counteract that one negative.  In “love the sinner, hate the sin,” yes, there is love, but then what comes next?  Sinner, hate, sin.  It is 3 to 1 in favor of the negatives. 

Let’s step back a minute and analyze the motivation for this statement. What are we really hoping to communicate to people?  What should we want to say to people? In trying to answer that question, it would be helpful to ask, how and what did Jesus communicate to people?

In Luke 5:17, Jesus heals a man whose friends lowered him down through the roof to get him close to where Jesus was inside a house. The first words out of Jesus’ mouth are surprising.  You’d think he’d say, “Who are you?” Or “What is going on here?” Or at least, “you are healed.”  But instead, you know what he says? “Your sins are forgiven.”  It pretty much shocked everyone there too.  Jesus’ point, he goes on to say, is that he has the power to forgive sin. Interesting, isn’t it, that he focuses on the forgiveness part! But that is who he is

In John 5:1-17 he meets another man who needs healing, and Jesus tells him to get up and walk. The man is healed, and later when they meet up again, Jesus says to him, “don’t sin anymore so that it will go well with you.” 

So Jesus is forgiving, and he addresses the sin, asking people to stop the sin.

Back in Luke 5, Jesus calls a tax collector named Levi to follow him, and Levi agrees to become one of his disciples.  Levi is elated about his new life of following Jesus, so he throws a big party at his house, and invites his friends.  Tax collectors were pretty edgy people, hanging with a rough crowd, and Levi invites them all to the party.  Do you think Jesus says, “Uh sorry, Levi, there’s no way I’m sullying my reputation by getting involved with these sinners!”?  Nope, Jesus parties it up.  Well the Pharisees and teachers of the law spy on him, and they start accusing him of hanging with sinners.  And guess what Jesus says!  This tells us so much about his approach to sin.  He says, “I came for sinners.” 

Jesus brings life and hope and forgiveness for those in sin.  He is merciful to them.  He loves them.  But in his mercy, he calls them to a better future.  He does not want them to stay in sin.  He calls them to stop the sin and follow his new way.

It reminds me of a story I heard. In college a young man had gone to a campus ministry, but he was just going through the motions, and only went to the campus ministry because he thought it would please his grandfather.  He eventually stopped attending because his heart wasn’t it in. Then he gave up on school too, dropped out of college, got a job, and started hanging out at bars almost every night.  He got wrapped up in selfish relationships, with no boundaries, as well as pornography.  A couple years went by, and he knew he needed to finish his college degree to advance his career, and he re-enrolled.  During that process another student invited him to go to the college ministry again.  He said “yeah” but again he really wasn’t interested.  He said he would go just because he is a people-pleaser.  Figuring that the guy wouldn’t follow up on him, and he would be off the hook, he made plans to head out to the bar.  But right at the time they agreed on, the guy called, and the campus ministry visit was back on.  So he reluctantly went to the campus ministry.  During the meeting a girl shared her story, emotionally describing numerous self-destructive behaviors she had been involved in, and how Jesus had forgiven her and she was now following his way of life.  The guy thought, “that’s all stuff that I do regularly…and she is talking about it like it was wrong.”  And right then and there, he broke down and repented of his sin and decided to follow Jesus’ way.  This was just like Jesus’ own conversations with people: repent, stop sinning, receive forgiveness, and follow him.  He is a gracious forgiving God, and his way of living is so much better than we could ever imagine.

What about you? Do you need to stop sinning, receive Jesus’ forgiveness and follow his way? He came for you!

All sins are not the same? [False ideas Christians believe about…Sin. Part 4]

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This week we have been fact-checking Christian statements about sin. In part 3 yesterday we looked at the phrase “all sins are the same.” Today we’re investigating its opposite: sins are different. There is an important sense in which sins are very, very different, and they are not the same.   In part 3, we saw how this statement is true in the claim the person made when they said that they are not a sinner because they haven’t committed murder or rape.  They are correct that there is a major difference between, say, shoplifting on the minor end, and human trafficking on the major end. 

As I already said in part 3, sins are equal in God’s eyes only in the sense that all humans are sinners.  But God’s word also gives evidence that all sins are not equal.  There is no doubt that some sins have much more devastating consequences, and are thus treated much more seriously by God.

Look at 1 Corinthians 6, for example, in verses 9-11 where Paul is talking about the equality of many sins.  He lists out a whole bunch of sins saying that they are equal in the sense that people who are engulfed in these sins cannot inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.  But look at his flow of thought as it continues in verses 15-20.  There he singles out one sin in particular and shows how deeply damaging it is to a person: the sin of sexual immorality.  He says in verse 18, that all other sins are committed outside the body, whereas sexual sins are against one’s own body!  What is so egregious about sexual sin is that a Christian’s body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Paul is saying, therefore, that sexual immorality is not the same as other sins!  But hear me, he is not saying that sexual immorality is the worst possible sin.  He is simply saying that it is different and should be seen that way, as it affects a person deep within.  How many of us have seen sexual immorality wreak havoc on people and relationships?  There is such a better way!  The way of Jesus.  That’s exactly what we saw last week when the writer of Hebrews quoted Deuteronomy 31:6 in Hebrews 13.  He said that Christians should be committed to keeping the marriage bed pure. 

That means that sexual expression should be between a man and a woman within the confines of marriage only.  When you are married, Christians are not to have sex with people other than your spouse.  Before you are married, you are not to have sex at all.  Why?  Because it is an intimate gift and when handled outside of a marriage commitment it hurts, it damages and can cause lasting effects.  God of course can forgive, but there are always effects to sin. He wants the best for you, so he sets up guidelines for that purpose. You can follow that standard for disciples of Jesus because God says that he will never leave you nor forsake you.

Why am I saying this?  Not to elevate sexual immorality as some super special category of sin.  No.  I am bringing it up because in the Bible we see that sexual immorality is not the same as other sins.  Think about the damage that sin does.  This is why Paul makes a big deal about sexual immorality, it does damage in relationships.  There are other sins that do massive damage as well.  Obviously, murder.  It is right for Christians to view murder as altogether different from other sins because murder is the taking of a life.  This is but one example of many.

Another is when Jesus taught, “But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”  He was pretty serious about protecting children.

So sins are all equal?  Or sins are different?  Both are true.  While we all have equal sin in God’s eyes, there are sins that are way worse than others in God’s eyes.  All are forgivable.  Redemption is possible in everything.  He can teach us through it all.  Some sins, just by their nature, have more effects, more ripples on more people and on His temple, our bodies, on his body, the church, and on his creation.

All sins are the same? [False ideas Christians believe about…Sin. Part 3]

This week I’ve started a blog series that will run for 11 weeks, in which we are fact checking ideas that Christians believe that might be totally false or at least partially so. This week we are looking at ideas about sin. Check out the first posts here and here that introduce the series and define sin. With this post, we begin fact-checking these ideas about sin. The first ideas two are contrasts: All sins are the same vs. Some sins are worse than others.

Which is true?  The statements totally conflict with each other.  Using simple logic, they can’t both be true, can they? 

Well, yes and no.  These statements need some explanation and biblical study.  That is what we want to do in this series, asking what does God have to say in the Bible about the topic?  Does God believe that all sins are the same?  Or does God teach us that some are worse than others?

As we attempt to answer these questions, we will seek to base our understanding on God who is the truth.  That is what is so unique and fascinating about Christianity.  We don’t hold to the idea that truth can ultimately be encapsulated in statements conceived and written by humans.  Instead, we Christians believe in the radical notion that Jesus is the truth.  He told us that he is the way, the truth and the life, and we believe in him.  This is foundational to differentiating between what is false and true, isn’t it?  Jesus is the truth!  Our understanding of what is true, then is rooted in our knowledge of him. 

So when we think about sin and whether or not all sins are equal, we have to evaluate this question based on what we know of Jesus. As we study these statements, we will come back to Jesus.

Let’s start with the first statement:  all sins are the same.

Are they? Of course not, because they are so different.  We know this.  Theft of a pack of gum at the store is on a whole different order of magnitude from murder or rape.  That doesn’t make the theft right, of course.  But clearly sins are different.  Different in their impact, in their consequences, and different in their ripple effect on the community and individuals.

So why do people say “all sins are the same?”  Often this phrase comes out of Christian’s mouths in reference to God’s justice.  When I have tried to share the story of Jesus to people, our conversation often comes to the part of the story that refers to Jesus dying for our sins.  Some people are loathe to agree that they have committed sins.  They think they are generally pretty good, and I suspect most are. They haven’t committed murder or rape, so they don’t consider themselves sinners. Sure they admit to telling white lies or doing other wrong things, but to them that is not sin.  To them that is just a mistake or error. In their opinion those occurrences of “missing the mark” are light years away from rape and murder or many other really awful things. 

They have a point, right?  So in those conversations it is important to show them from the Bible that God does count all sins the same in the sense that even what they consider to be a small mistake or error is actually an indication of our essential difference from God.  Whereas God is holy and perfect, we are not, even if we haven’t committed atrocities. 

In that sense it is important that all people understand that they have sin in their life.  This is a big emphasis in Paul’s argument in the letter to the Romans.  Chapter 3 especially: “There is none righteous, no not one.” And, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  There really is a sense in which all sins are the same in God’s eyes, but only when we are discussing the idea that all people are equally in need of Jesus because of our sin.

Sure, the Bible talks about the 7 deadly sins, and the unpardonable sin.  There is much debate about what is the worst sin. We won’t be able to answer that until we’re in heaven and can ask God!  Where we have gone wrong in our culture, therefore, is when we elevate some sins above others.  In the 1920s, it was alcohol, and there was prohibition.  Then for years we made divorce out to be the worst sin.  Christians who got divorced were almost shunned.  My wife’s uncle, for example, was a missionary in Africa, got divorced, and then remarried.  But his church here stateside, even after he was remarried, will not allow him to serve in leadership in the church because he was previously divorced! 

Then divorce gave its exalted status as the cardinal sin over to another.  Think 1960s and 1970s.  What sin became the new worst sin?  Abortion.  For years abortion was put forth as the worst possible thing a person could do.  Rallies and picket lines outside abortion clinics, including worse atrocities, were justified by people who said God was somehow punishing America for this new cardinal of legalized abortion.  But time went by, and it changed again.  What was the new worst sin after abortion?  Homosexual practice.  And perhaps in many minds that one still holds to the top spot today. 

Drunkenness, Divorce, Abortion and Homosexual practice are all sins.  But we are wrong to elevate one sin as somehow worse than any other.  That is another way in which there is a proper sense of seeing sins equally.  For example, we will rail against a person who is a practicing homosexual, but we say very little about our own gluttony or lying or excessive drinking.  Again, all of us are sinners, and we need to see that.

So, yes, all sin is the same, but sins are also very different, which will see in part 4 tomorrow.

Attempting to define sin [False ideas Christians believe about…Sin. Part 2]

Image result for miss the mark

What are some of the famous phrases that you have heard about sin?  Have you heard these phrases before?

  • All sins are the same.  No sin is worse than any other. 
  • Or it’s contrast, some sins are worse than others.
  • Love the sinner, hate the sin.

You might look at that list and think, “But wait…aren’t they in the Bible?”  In other words, “Isn’t that statement true?” 

What we are going to try to establish, and perhaps I will fail, is that each one of these statements or principles is either totally false, or somehow partially false.  Some of these statements or principles are not in the Bible.  Some, however, are based on biblical material, but misunderstood by many people. 

We are going to fact check these statements about sin, but first it is important for us to ask, what is sin?

Almost 20 years ago I attended a talk by Michael Murray who was at the time a philosophy professor at Franklin & Marshall College nearby.  He said that for years he would ask his students at F&M about the definition of evil.  There would be disagreements, of course, but what all agreed on, for years, is that the Nazi holocaust and war for world domination was evil, wrong, and sinful.  But then something happened.  As our culture changed, some students, not many, but some, started saying things like, “Well, I don’t like what the Nazis did, and I myself would never do that, but I can’t say that it was wrong.”  You and I may shake our heads at that, but it shows that there is a huge difference of opinion out there as to what sin is.  Even in my church and yours, I would guess we have some different views on what sin is.  So what is sin?

The Bible has a surprising number of ways to describe it, and there are many words for it.  In the Old Testament, one of the most common words for sin, has a very picturesque definition: “to miss the mark” or “to go astray.”  In the New Testament, we find similar definitions.  One word is the Greek “scandalon” where we get our English word “scandal”, and this too has very picturesque meaning, “to cause someone to stumble” or “fall into a trap.”

Another one of the most common words for sin in the New Testament means, “to act contrary to the will and law of God.”  Here are a couple verses using that word.

James 4:17 – Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

1 John 3:4 – Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.

So to summarize, sin is human choice to act against God’s wishes.

But when we hear from time to time these phrases or principles about sin, it seems that people can be confused, so let’s fact check them. Check back in tomorrow for part 3 when we’ll look at our first phrase about sin that many Christians believe, but perhaps is false