Sin - Chambers, Oswald
Sin is not mans problem, it is gods. Beware of attempting to diagnose sin unless you have the inner pang that you are one of the worst sinners. Whenever you talk about sin, it must be my sin. So long as you speak of sins you evade Jesus Christ for yourself. Sin is the outcome of a relationship god never ordained, a relationship which maintains itself by means of a wrong disposition, viz. , my claim to my right to myself. That is the essence of sin. My right to myself is not merely something i claim, but something that continually makes me insist on my own way.
Whenever god touches sin it is independence that is touched and that awakens resentment in the human heart. Independence must be blasted clean out, there must be no such thing left, only freedom, which is very different. Freedom is the ability not to insist on my rights, but to see that god gets his.
There are people whose actual lives shock us, and there are those whose actual lives are speckless, but whose ruling disposition is my claim to my right to myself. Watch jesus christ with them both, and you get the attitude we have lost. Jesus christ never faced men as we do; you may put before him publicans and sinners and clean- living moral men, and you find he is much sterner with the latter. To recognise this would mean a revo- lution in our outlook. Original sin is doing without god. That phrase covers sin in its beginning in human consciousness and its final analysis in the sight of god. For from within, out of the heart of man pro- ceed . . . (see mark 7:2123). We should get into the habit of estimating ourselves by the rugged statements of our lord.
The thing that makes me feel i am different from the common herd never came from god: i am not different. Remember, the same stuff that makes the criminal makes the saint. A saint is a new creation (RV mg), made by the last Adam out of the progeny of the first Adam no matter how degraded. . . . Christ Jesus came into the world to save sin- ners (1 timothy 1:15). What is a sinner? Everyone who is not one with Jesus as he is one with god. Our lord did not scathe sin; he came to save from it. We are apt to put the superb blessings of the gospel as something for a special few, they are for sinners saved by grace. A man may be magnificently saved and appall- ingly backward in development, or he may be a maturely developed saint, like the apostle Paul; but neither is more than saved by gods grace. When Jesus Christ begins to get his way he is merciless with the thing that is not of god. As long as things are kept covered up we think gods judgement is severe, but let the holy ghost reveal the secret vileness of sin till it blazes out in a conspicuous glare, and we realise that his judgement is right.
The reason men enclose themselves away from the gospel is that conviction of sin upsets the inner balance of mind, consequently of bodily health, but when once a man is convinced that holiness is of more importance than bodily health, he lets all go to get holy. The first appeal of present-day evangelism is apt to be, not on the line of how to get rid of sin, but how to be put right for heaven, consequently men are not convicted of sin, but left with a feeling of something insufficient in life. The only hope for a man lies not in giving him an example of how to behave, but in the preaching of Jesus christ as the saviour from sin. The heart of every man gets hope when he hears that. Our lord never sympathised with sin, he came to proclaim liberty to the captives, a very different thing. We have to see that we dont preach a theology of sympathy, but the theology of a saviour from sin.
It is not our business to convict men of sin, the holy ghost alone convicts of sin (rv ), our duty is to lift up the one who sets free from sin. It is not a question of something being curbed, or counteracted, or sat on, it is a radical alteration on the inside, then i have to assimilate that alteration so that it is manifested in the practical relationships of my life.
The life of the holy spirit in a saint is fierce and violent against any tendency to sin.
The attitude of Jesus towards sin is to be our attitude towards sins.
When conviction of sin by the holy spirit comes it gives us an understanding of the deeps of our personality we are otherwise not conscious of ( john 16:811).
The forgiveness of god penetrates to the very heart of his nature and to the very heart of mans nature. That is why god cannot forgive until a man realises what sin is.
. Sin is reality; sins are actuality.
. Measure your growth in grace by your sensitiveness to sin
many a man gets to the place where he will call himself a sinner, but he does not so readily come to the place where he says, against thee, thee only, have i sinned. . . . Salvation from sin is frequently confounded with, deliverance from sins.
A man can deliver himself from sins without any special work of gods grace. The bedrock of new testament salvation is repentance, and repentance is based on relationship to a person. A great many people are delighted to hear about the life of Jesus, its holiness and sublimity, but when the holy ghost begins to convict them of sin, they resent it, and resent it deeply. Conviction of sin in the beginning is childs play compared with the conviction the holy ghost brings to a mature saint (see 1 timothy 1:15). Humiliation by conviction of sin is rare today. You can never be humiliated by another human being after the conviction of sin the holy ghost gives. On the threshold of the christian life people talk a lot about sin, but there is no realisation of what sin is, all that is seen is the effects of sin.
If we are ever going to come anywhere near understanding what our lords agony in the garden of gethsemane represents, we have to get beyond the small ideas of our particular religious experiences and be brought to see sin as god sees it for he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of god in him.
If we eliminate the supernatural purpose of Jesus Christs coming, viz. , to deliver us from sin, we become traitors to gods revelation.
The cross of Christ is gods last and endless word. There the prince of this world is judged, there sin is killed, and pride is done to death, there lust is frozen and self-interest slaughtered, not one can get through.
It was not social crimes, but the great primal sin of independence of god, that brought the son of god to Calvary.