De-stigmatizing sin

Too often as Christians, we allow the shame brought by sin and temptation to control us. We seek to hide our shortcomings from ourselves, from God, and from our fellow Christians, because we fear failure and judgement. We fear being branded with a scarlet letter, cast out by our friends, left behind by a disappointed God—and so we cower among the weeds of our guilt and shame, not realizing that the key to our freedom is the truth. The terrifying, beautiful truth.

We cannot successfully combat an enemy that we refuse to acknowledge. This is why, if the church wants to build a community that truly supports one another in the fight for truth, we must work to remove the stigma on sin and temptation. Not to accept these things as things we can’t or shouldn’t change, but to recognize that all of us struggle in unique ways, that temptation does not equate with sin, and that only by being open with ourselves, God, and each other about our struggles, can we truly begin to win the battle.

Our church communities will become more loving, more supportive, and closer to God’s design if we build on these truths:

1. Temptation is not sin. Even Jesus was tempted; one of the most miraculous things about Jesus is that He understands, on a personal level, the acuteness of temptation and its pervasiveness in our lives. But though Jesus was tempted, that temptation never resulted in sin. Temptation, therefore, or the pull we experience to disobey God, must be separate from sin. As Christians we must learn to stop punishing ourselves and each other for being tempted in certain ways; on the contrary, we should see temptation as an opportunity to choose God over ourselves by rejecting the worldly satisfaction it offers us. Not until we give in to temptation does it become sin.
2. Every person struggles with temptations and sinful habits that are at once uniquely personal and completely relatable. Sin comes into our lives as the result of our dissatisfaction with God, which everyone has in common. But we all experience temptation and sin in different ways, based on our own individual life experiences and inherent tendencies. Not everyone is inclined toward the same sin; some sins are more subtle, like unchecked pride, whereas some take a more prominent place in our lives, like an expression of sexuality that departs from God’s design. Every sin, though, comes as a result of us choosing, as we so often do, to follow ourselves rather than God.
3. For this reason, every sin is equally repugnant to God. No vice, no matter how it may seem to us in our human reasoning, is more or less acceptable in God’s eyes. Whenever we stray from God’s path, that is a betrayal of Him and His perfection. This is bad news, because it highlights how insufficient we are to save ourselves by our own merit; it is good news because though that is true, God’s plan was to save us and redeem us from the lives of sin we once led before coming to Him.
4. The church must rise to support its members with openness, passing no judgement on each other in the knowledge that judgement for all will come from God. We must create an environment in which sin is identified through the Word of God, and we must take on the attitude of Christ: to hate the sin, and love the sinner. We must encourage each other to confess our sins, and empower each other, through prayer and encouragement, to combat temptations that threaten to pull us away from God. We were never meant to fight these battles alone.

Healing begins with an open and honest diagnosis. And the miraculous thing is, in Christ we have a great Physician, who loves us and promises to meet all of our needs as we seek to follow Him