11.01 The sense of sin
I. THE SENSE OF SIN OF the parables of our Lord, that of the Pharisee and the Publican is one of the shortest and most searching. It is a picture of the inner and secret life of man, as it is laid bare before the absolute Truth. It teaches a fundamental lesson, which must be known and grasped before any other lesson of the Christian life can be really understood or fruitfully followed. The lesson is that one of the foundations of character must be a personal sense of sin.
Life is the sum of our relationships. Our life is true and right, just in proportion as our relationships with ourselves, our fellows, the world, and God, are right and true. There can be no question that, of all these complex relationships, the deepest and the most important is that in which we stand towards God. He is the unity of all the rest; and, therefore, the very basis of our life, without which it can have no security, is the attitude in which in our inmost souls we stand towards Him. To be wrong there, is to be wrong utterly. It is the one fatal error. To be right there is, ultimately, to be right everywhere. It is the one final truth.
Now we know what our relationship with God ought to be. Our conscience, trained by the long centuries of God’s discipline of this race, knows that our relationship with Him is meant to be that of sons living in free independence upon a Father, finding more and more in obedience to Him their perfect freedom, in knowledge of Him their eternal life, in love of Him their all-sufficing peace and joy. That filial union is the true meaning of our life. That is what we are meant to be. The conscience of each one assures us that as a matter of fact, it is not what we are. Something has intervened, has broken and disturbed this unity. It is the force which we call sin.
Sin in its essence is self-will, self-satisfaction, the assertion of independence of God.
God’s will for us union with Himself that is our Eden. Self-will that is our Adam. For “every man is the Adam of his own soul.” Union with God -that is life.
Separation f rom God that is death. And sin is within us as a disease which is gradually, and most certainly alienating us from the life of God and bringing us towards death. We are all infected by it. Therefore, the first step to any recovery of our true life is to recognize both the presence and the gravity of sin. To confess our sin, to be penitent, to be anxious about salvation that is nothing morbid or unreal; it is only the honesty which faces the fact. It is the first essential of health. No man is healthy, or can be healthy, until he has learned to confess his sin. For without the sense of sin, we are making a mistake in the primary relationship of life. Nothing can go well with us until we have dealt with ourselves honestly there. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
TAGS: [Parables]