Sin: In the Bible you'll read the word sin and you'll probably hear it spoken of in and out of church. Sin is not just the bad things people do (although it is that too). In the Bible sin means: to miss the mark.
When you guys were 6 and 8 (just this past year) we took you to a community fair thing. One of the booths there was for archery. A game and fish officer actually taught you how to hold a real bow and arrow and shoot it at a target. And you got the opportunity to actually shoot that bow and arrow yourself. You steadied your arrow, pulled back your bow, aimed at your bulls eye target and let go! Some of your shots were great! You actually hit the bulls eye. But some of your shots were sin... they missed the mark.
Now, not hitting the bulls eye isn't sin in the way you and I hear the word sin. We hear it and we think of being bad or guilty. And that is true, sin does involve being bad and guilty. But knowing that sin is first of all missing the mark helps to understand God's beautiful mark for you! There is a mark. There is a bulls eye. There is a way you were made to be. But like a defective arrow, you and I and all people live in such a way that misses the mark God made for us to hit.
What's the mark? God made us to reveal His glory. (More church words, I know. We'll get to that.) Like a mirror reflects the image of the person looking in it, we were made to reflect the goodness, the rightness, the love, the beauty of God who made us.
The Bible says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Romans 3:3. Every person has missed the mark of being the glorious reflector of God he or she was made to be. Even when we try really hard to do what's right we fail. The fact that we have so many rules and laws and punishments shows that we are trying to keep the damage from our dangerously off-course lives contained. Like wild arrows missing the target we hurt others, ourselves and the world around us.
Spend a few hours with a couple of two year olds and you'll see that we don't even have to learn how to miss the mark. We do it automatically. Its like its natural or normal for us to be selfish and hurt each other. But its not normal. Its fallen. Its the natural rotted. Its not the way we were created to be. But its in us. And like a little mold growing from the center of a delicious berry pie, its going to spread and ruin the whole of who we are. Its leading to our total rottenness and destruction. Like a silent but deadly cancer that leads to the certain death of its host, sin is in us all, and its result is death.
Death is not part of the original mark of God's creation. Death came because of the first man's sin and has been past down in our nature ever since. We all die. Even while we live we experience the decay, the breakdown, the dying effects of sin.
Some people think its mean to say we sin or we're sinners. I think it even more cruel to say this is the way we're supposed to be. There's an wonderful anticipation of something better when you can see that you sin because you are a sinner. You're not a sinner because you do bad things, you do bad things because you're not what you were made to be. The Savior of the World came to save sinners, not people who think they are what they're supposed to be. You have to know you're lost before you can be found. You have to know you're broken before you can be healed. You have to know you sin before you can be saved.
This [is] a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. -1 Timothy 1:15
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