This week we’ll begin a new series on the blog about belief. Knowing what we believe is critical. So often however we float through life simply going through the motions. In a recent study, random passers-by were asked what they believed about a variety of faith matters. In the next several weeks we’ll cover this list of beliefs, what many believe and what the bible teaches about these beliefs. 

This week we start with a fundamental topic that at first glance sounds pretty churchy. It’s a term called sin. Before we get too far into this, what exactly is sin? According to Christian belief, sin is any word, thought or action that demonstrates a flaw in our nature. Sins are everything from an evil thought, calling someone a name, an impure desire or a fundamentally destructive action.

A simple way to look at sin is the idea of missing the mark. Imagine a dart board, and every word – thought – action in your life is a dart thrown at the dart board. Your goal is to hit the bullseye every single time. In life our goal is absolute perfection, all the time. So every time you miss the bullseye is like every time we fail to be perfect. Simply put, we call that sin.

A recent survey report shows that approximately 52% of Christians believe most people are by nature good and only sin a little. While this may sound innocent at first glance, it does demonstrate a pretty significant problem! The bible states that all have sinned and therefore have fallen short of God’s standard of perfection. We’ve missed the mark!

Let’s go back to that dart board analogy again. In a game of darts there’s really no punishment for missing the bullseye. You just miss out on a few points. But that’s not the case with sin.  The difference between darts and sin is that when we miss the bullseye of a perfect life by sinning, the bible says we die. Paul writes in Romans for the wages of sin is death. That means the penalty for missing the mark of perfection is that we die! Pretty harsh stuff! Perhaps that’s why we don’t like to talk about it and when we do we tend to water it down a bit!

But we probably need to finish the verse here: for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. You see if we complete this dart board analogy, we’ll realize that when we miss the bullseye of perfection Jesus steps in and does what we cannot. He removes the missed dart and puts in the bullseye for us. No matter how far away the dart falls, Jesus picks it up and puts it in the bullseye.

Sin is a reminder that we’re not perfect. The doctrine of sin is a realization that we don’t have what it takes to hit the mark perfectly every single time. It’s the reality that even when we think we’re kind of good people, we still make mistakes. We’re flawed. And we need someone to right our wrongs. Next week we’ll dive deeper into what it looks like when Jesus hits the bullseye for us. But for now give thanks in the work God did for you to do what you were unable to do. Your sins are gone and in their place is the perfect work (bullseye) of Jesus!