New Morning Mercies #276

You simply must not underestimate sin and you simply cannot overestimate grace.

Think for a moment: whose sin do you tend to minimize? Your friends’? Your spouse’s? Your children’s? Your neighbors’? Your extended family members’? Your father’s or mother’s? Your boss’s? For most of us, the problem is not that we underestimate the sin of others. No, we tend to do the opposite. We’re typically all too focused on the failure of others. We find it all too easy to point out their flaws. We’re all tempted to keep a running record of the specific sins of the people around us. If we were honest, most of us would have to humbly confess that we tend to be far more concerned about the sin of the people around us than our own. We tend to be hyperaware of the weaknesses of those living near us while we appear to be functionally blind to our own. For this reason, we begin to forget that we are more like them than unlike them, that there are few things that we can see in the lives of others that are not present in our own lives in some way.

Now, this outward concern/inward denial dynamic is not okay. Blindness to your own sin is a denial of the presence of personal spiritual need. Such a denial always leads to a devaluing of and a resistance to God’s grace. Denying your need for grace and underestimating the power of what that grace can do never, ever leads to anything good.

Here’s the problem—this side of forever, we are all very good at doing both. We’re all very good at looking at our sin and naming it less than sin, and we all tend to degrade the glory of what grace has done, is doing, and will do. People who deny sin tend to not progressively conquer it, and people who devalue grace tend not to run to it for help. What we’re talking about here are the two sides of a healthy Christian life. You confess that although you are in Christ, the presence of sin is still within you. However, it is being progressively defeated, and you humbly embrace the fact that you have been given glorious grace that can do for you what you could never do for yourself.

The admission of sin doesn’t lead you somewhere dark and depressing, because you know you’ve been given grace that is greater than your sin, and your celebration of grace is real and heartfelt because it’s done in the context of your confession of the very sin that grace addresses. Confession of sin without the celebration of grace leads to guilt, self-loathing, timidity, and spiritual paralysis. Embracing grace without the admission of sin leads to confident theological “always rightism,” but does not result in change in your heart and life. So today, refuse to minimize sin, reject the temptation to devalue grace, and run to Jesus weeping and celebrating at the same time.

For further study and encouragement: 1 John 2:1–17