“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the bits of hope more seasoned parents often give to parents who are busy navigating their way through the teenage years (count me in on that journey) is that there will come a day when your kids say to you, “Dad, you were right.” That statement will pretty much always be framed in the past tense because in the present they’re never going to admit that anymore than we would have done when we were their age. But someday – or so they keep telling me – they’ll finally reach the place of agreeing with us. Getting to that place, though, isn’t easy for either party. In a similar kind of way, one of the hardest parts of the Gospel is having to get to the point that we agree with God. Let’s talk today about what that means and what makes it so hard.

To repeat an idea we talked about yesterday, if we are going to be able to make the most positive sense out of Easter, there are some things we have to know first. One of the most important of those is for us to get God’s character right. We have to not only get His character right, but we have to understand what His character means for us. God is holy and righteous and just and good. He is the fullest expression imaginable of all of those things. Because He is all of those things, and because He is the one who created the world and everything in it, His character forms the basis of the moral expectations that are on us as creatures created in His image.

As we also talked about yesterday, though, while we may have been on track with His character in the beginning, that’s not a track we stayed on for very long. Before too long after creation was completed, we chose to declare ourselves autonomous from our Creator. That was bad enough in and of itself, but the trouble quickly expanded from there. When we disconnected from God, we disconnected from His character as well. And although we still retained our nature as His image bearers, with someone other than Him as our chiefly recognized authority, we didn’t look to His character as our primary source of example and direction any longer. The trick here is that while His character is reflected throughout His creation, there’s no source of it in creation other than Him.

In practical terms, this means we started to do what wasn’t right for us to do. It wasn’t right for us to do because it didn’t fall in line with His character which is the measuring stick by which we know whether or not something is right to do. In this sense, all sin is a deviation from God’s character. When we use a justification for our actions other than living in line with His character and bringing Him glory as we were designed to do in the beginning, the thoughts we think and the things we do are not going to be the right things to do. When our final goal is advancing our own interests instead of His interests (which are always in our best interest whereas our interests are not), we are going to do things that deviate rather widely from the standards of His character.

And while we can sit back to objectively analyze things and see what is the right thing for someone else to do, when we are thinking about ourselves and what we want to do, if glorifying God is not our primary intention, doing the right thing becomes a whole lot harder. Instead, we are going to find ways to justify doing the thing we want to do to advance our own interests. The deceptive nature of sin here runs pretty deep. We are convinced in a given moment that our actions are good and right for us to do. Indeed, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be doing them. We always do the thing we most want to do in any given moment. And we don’t see anything wrong with this. I mean, sure, there are sometimes consequences that follow our actions that we don’t like, but if we got what we wanted out of the whole deal, then the problem is really with how the people around us reacted to it, not with what we did.

Do you see how the thinking here goes? As a result, we don’t see these deviations from God’s character as a problem at all. That is, we don’t agree with God about sin. We may agree with Him about a lot of things, but not this one. Instead, in order to justify our sin, we harbor all sorts of wrong ideas about it. We think of sin as merely harmless fun. Better yet, it is forbidden fun. That’s always the best kind, right? Sin is just worldly wisdom. Sure, it may not always line up with what God thinks, but He doesn’t really understand life in the day to day. After all, if you’re going to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. Sin is a secret knowledge. Everybody wants to be in on the secret. And, at the end of the day, it’s really no big deal. Sure, there are big sins like murder, and you should avoid things like that, but the small stuff? Don’t sweat it. It’s mostly harmless. As long as nobody was hurt, who cares?

But the truth is that sin is a really big deal. All of it. All sin is a rejection of God’s sovereignty as God. It is a repudiation of His character. It is a declaration that while He says these things are right and good to do, He’s wrong. These other things are instead. Sin is a full-throated embrace of evil. Indeed, anything that does not fall in line with His character is evil. That’s not a terribly comfortable thought to think, but it’s no less true for it. Because God is the only source of goodness in the world, things which are not sourced from Him and come from out of His character are not good. They are evil. Perhaps even worse yet, sin is a total separation from life. God is the only source of life in the world. When we detach from Him and act as fully autonomous agents, we cannot create life. Well, when you don’t have life, you have death. Sin brings death. All of these things are true about all sin. To say it again, then, it really is a big deal.

There’s one more bit of trouble here. Sin is a trap. It warps our thinking. It takes hold of our decision making processes. We can’t escape its clutches on our own. We choose it at first, but then it quickly becomes our master. The exact nature of this master can take a variety of different forms, but the result is always the same. We are stuck with it. Even when we want to get rid of it, we can’t. We are driven back to it again and again; we are driven back to compulsively doing the things that we want rather than the things that God wants. And I know that doesn’t sound so bad, but as we have already established, the things we want are not ultimately going to be for our good while His are. The things we want do not originate in His character. They may be dressed up to look good and right and true in the beginning, but eventually the mirage will fade and we’ll be left with a mess that we cannot escape.

What all of this means is that we need saving. We are stuck in a pit we cannot get out of on our own. We need help. Well, this is exactly what Jesus came to do. He came to pay the price for our sin by His death so that we can have freedom from it. He rose to be able to give us life instead of the death by which we were previously trapped. Easter, in this sense, is a celebration of freedom and life. It is a rejoicing in grace and forgiveness. It is an embrace of being able to be right with God in Christ. But none of that can happen unless and until we are willing to agree with God about our sin. Until we are willing to acknowledge our need for saving, we won’t accept His help; we won’t receive His gift.

Here are some questions, then, to reflect on as you go throughout the rest of this week: Do you agree with God about your sin? Do you agree with Him about all of it? Are there parts of it that you don’t agree? Why not? What is it about those places that you want to keep separate from Him? What interests of yours are you trying to preserve at the expense of His better, nobler, truer interests? Where are you holding back, trying to save yourself still instead of letting Him do the work that only He can do? In what ways does self-righteousness still have a hold of your heart? The grace Jesus won for us on the cross, the grace Jesus came bringing with Him when He walked out of that grave, is indeed amazing. But we have to be willing to receive it. And that means acknowledging that we need it. So, do you need it?