A sinless day?
I have a good friend who once told me that he believed that it is possible for us to live a sinless life. Not only is it possible, he said, but we are supposed to do it. Well, that was a new thought for me. After all, there's some verse somewhere that says if we say we have no sin, we are liars and the truth is not in us. But, his comment got me to thinking.
My ladies group and I, believe it or not, are still studying the mind of Christ. I haven't posted about it recently because of various interruptions. But, in pursuing this subject and this goal, all agree (because this is what the good book says) that Christ never sinned. He was tempted like we are, but always, "chose wisely". So the question becomes, is it possible to go through a day without sinning? Think about that for a minute. An entire day where you choose wisely; where your decisions are in harmony with God's will; where your emotions are in check; where you treat the people around you like God would. Is that humanly possible?
My questions of late always seem to navigate back to the humanity of Jesus. If Jesus was fully human, which I believe he was, then how was he able to do this? Be sinless, I mean. I know he was also fully divine simultaneously. This is a great mystery and one that bugs me. So, do we just look at Jesus and say, "No fair. He was divine. Of course we can't be sinless". Seems to me if we say that, then that gives us an excuse to not try. I mean, why try so hard not to sin when we're going to.
I believe I've had sinless days. In fact, I think I just had one last Tuesday. That's why I'm thinking about all this. Last Tuesday, I was sick...so sick that every time I stood up, I threw up. Needless to say, I stayed in bed all day. I was in and out of consciousness as my body was trying to right itself. I think that was a sinless day. But, it wasn't a very productive day. I didn't help anyone. I didn't influence anyone. No one saw Christ in me that day. Is that the kind of day I have to have to be sinless?
I wonder if my friend is right. Are we asked by God to be sinless? Are we capable? What is it about the human Jesus that gave him this ability? If Jesus could do it because he had this other special quality, then he had no right to put such high standards before us. I do believe that he was sinless as a human, not as God, and as a fellow human, what does that say to me?
posted by pat @ 8:17 AM
5 Comments:
My version of this question confronts me as, did Jesus ever steal from the cookie jar? Did he ever hit his sister when they were little? (Interestingly, there are a lot of apocryphal stories about Jesus' childhood in gospels outside the canon; in one, he points his finger and zaps a kid who's being a bully...but I digress.)
I think part of what makes this question confusing is trying to get a handle on exactly what we mean by "sin." I'm pretty sure that if Jesus was human and had a childhood where he matured like everyone else, that he did the same kinds of things other kids do: hit his sister, stole cookies and tried to worm his way out of trouble, etc. But are these things "sin?"
And as adults--is sinlessness defined purely as "doing nothing wrong" or "not disobeying," or is there a positive quality to living rightly that isn't captured by simply not stepping out of bounds?
Good questions, Ma. No wonder you spawned a theologian. You're one yourself, you know.
Thank you my daughters. This is what I'm trying to get at. What is sin exactly? Do we even have a clear concept on how it is used in scripture? Is what we think of as sin, what God had in mind?
I think it's something to think about.
I think it's part of human nature that we want to make sin a manageable concept, so that we can know when we have and haven't avoided it. Thus the pervasiveness of checklist, legalistic, moralistic mentalities in religious type people. But I suspect that a real definition of sin would be something much more amorphous, something like, "going against God," and that might take many different forms during the course of a day, including things we generally think of as totally innocuous and (possibly) not including things we routinely think of as heinously sinful...
P.S. I'm about to bake up a batch of yummy sourdough bread...you won't belive it, but I ignored poor ol' Marcus the Stoic Starter for about 6 months and he's still got it goin' on.
Yikes everyone, I've been thinking about this too. And I've recently, for the first time in my life, begun journaling -- what does that mean?? Anyway, in my private thoughts I wrote that perhaps if I evaluated sin as "something that God never intended for His creation" I could see sin more easily. Is that like way too vague??? Cuz I kinda like it.
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