President Calvin Coolidge was known as “silent Cal,” a man of few words. He came home from church one Sunday. His wife had been unable to attend, so she asked what the pastor had spoken about in the service. Coolidge responded, “sin.” “Well, what did he say about it?” “I think he was against it.”
Sin is not a popular subject these days. Some people seem to think that it is not a minister’s job is to make them feel uncomfortable. The pastor is supposed to dispense good feeling all around. “Keep it positive, preacher, there is enough bad news in the world. I don’t come to church to hear bad news!”
Certainly, the Christian gospel is good news. But we cannot understand the good news of God’s salvation without an understanding of the bad news of sin and its eternal consequences. This is why Jesus came into the world and died for sinners: to save us.
But what about the persistence of indwelling sin in the life of the believer? From the time we trust in Christ for salvation, we are engaged in a battle against sin. In the words of D. M. Lloyd-Jones, sin is “a terrible power. It has a fiendish quality, a malignity which is truly terrifying. . . . It is not something light and comparatively trivial.. . . It is so deep-seated and so much a part of us that the entire (person) is affected — the intellect, the desires, and therefore the will. Indeed, it constitutes such a terrible problem that God alone in Christ can deal with it.”
The apostle John has some of the strongest statements about this to be found in the New Testament. In his first letter he says that sin in a Christian is evidence that he or she is not “abiding,” or living in close fellowship with Christ. He says that sin is such a serious matter that there are some sins which may result in premature death. “There is a sin that leads to death,” John says in 1 John 3:16.
If 1 John 3:16 sounds strange to our ears it may be because we do not take God’s word seriously enough. John’s original readers were probably familiar with the stories of church members Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-11). The man about whom Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 5:5 suffered “the destruction of the flesh” because of his very serious sin. Some Christians in the church at Corinth were said to have “fallen asleep” (a euphemism for death) because they had desecrated the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:30).
The church of Jesus Christ has a responsibility to help members who have fallen into sin. If brothers or sisters in Christ are struggling with addictions, idols of materialism or greed, uncontrolled anger and violence, spiritual indifference, unconcern for spiritual growth, dishonesty, adultery, or neglect of corporate worship, more mature believers have a responsibility to come alongside and try to restore them to fellowship with Christ (Galatians 6:1-2).
There is something else the church can do. That is to pray. “If anyone sees a brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray, and God will give him life. I refer to those whose sin does not lead to death” ( 1 John 3:16). It does no good to pray for those whose sin has led to physical death. They are already dead. John adds in that regard, “I am not saying that he should pray about that.”
Praying for brothers and sisters who have stumbled and fallen may help lead them to a new lease on life. In the first chapter of his letter, John promises forgiveness, cleansing and spiritual restoration (1 John 1:8-10). “All wrongdoing is sin,” John says, “and there is sin that does not lead to death” (1 John 5:17). The prayerful concern of fellow believers may have a life-giving effect in a Christian who has stumbled into sin.
A pastor preached on Micah 7:19, “You will hurl our iniquities into the depths of the sea.” His ten-year-old son said to him afterward, “Daddy, when you were talking about the Lord casting our sins into the sea, you ought to have said that sins were heavy like stones, and would drop out of sight, or the people might think that they would float like corks on the top.” The boy had a point.
Thanks be to God for the promise, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
Pastor Randy Faulkner