Sin: Knowing the Truth About it Will Set You Free

ZChurch message for June 10, 2023 (full service:    • Sin: Knowing the …  )

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32). Knowing the truth about sin will make you free – free from condemnation for sin and free from bondage to sin. First, we need to know the truth of what sin really is. Sin isn’t just a list of dos and don’ts; our spiritual standing with God isn’t just a balance sheet of credits and debits. All your debts have been paid, and nothing more can ever be laid to your charge. But that’s only where the story of life in Christ begins.

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WHAT IS SIN?

Is it a system of dos and don’t? If so, is it just the top ten? But there’s a bunch of other commandments in the Bible. Then there’s all the things that our religious traditions have taught us to think are sin. There ends up being more dos and don’ts than a person can keep track of, so how do you identify what’s sin and what isn’t?

Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”

One definition for the word translated sin is “to miss the mark.” The mark is the glory of God. Anything outside the circle of God’s perfect glory in the center of the target is sin.

If you want to live by a system of dos and don’ts, then the do is to do all the fullness of the glory of God, and the don’t is don’t do anything inconsistent with the perfect glory of God.

WHERE DID SIN COME FROM?

Romans 5:12  “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—

13  (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. 

14  Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.”

Sin had to “enter” the world.

Imputed – “To charge; to attribute; to set to the account of”

The condition, or state of sin entered and came upon all men two and a half thousand years before there was a law under which to charge men and attribute acts of sin to their account.

THE STATE OF SIN

One of the definitions for the word translated sin is, “to be without a share” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon). Without a share in what?

2Peter 1:4  “by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.”

God made man in His own image and after His own likeness because God wants man to share with Him in His divine nature. Through Adam’s transgression, man forfeited his share in the divine nature and became disenfranchised. Man was now outside the glory and doomed to wander in conduct that inherently misses the mark and is contrary to the ways of God.

ENTER THE LAW 

Romans 3:20  “Therefore by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.”

The law wasn’t given to provide us with a way to justify ourselves by doing to dos and not doing the don’ts. The law was given to provide a measuring stick by which to see that we don’t measure up, that we fall short of the glory, that we lack a share in the divine nature and are in the state called sin.

The law also leveled charges against us. For the first time men could be charged with their own personal infractions of God’s laws and have sin imputed to them.

In the civil society, a person can be evil but we cannot prove it, or prosecute them for it, until we have a law to measure their conduct by. Then we have grounds to bring charges against them when their evil nature causes them to violate the law. The violation of the law did not make them evil, but merely demonstrated their preexisting evil state.

ENTER JESUS

John 3:16  “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (everlasting life i.e. a share in the divine nature)

Some have likened forgiveness of sin to the financial concept of entering a credit in the credit column of a ledger that counterbalances the debits in the debit column. Unfortunately, that concept keeps us seeing a ledger and an ongoing accounting of our sins. What God has done for us through Jesus is so far above and beyond that it blows away the whole ledger. It even blows away the handwriting of the dos and don’ts under which we previously could have been charged with sin.

Hebrews 10:12  But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God,

• “Forever” means future sins are just as forgiven as past – forgiven in advance.

Hebrews 1:3  who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

• Not just a credit that balances the debits. Jesus “purged” the debit column so there’s no record of any debts ever owed. 

Hebrews 8:12  FOR I WILL BE MERCIFUL TO THEIR UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, AND THEIR SINS AND THEIR LAWLESS DEEDS I WILL REMEMBER NO MORE.

• Not just forgiven, but wiped from memory by choice.

Hebrews 10:2  For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins.

• God does not remember our sins – we should not be conscious of our sins.

Colossians 2:14  having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

• What Jesus did forgave sin, purged and expunged it from our record, then wiped out the laws under which we could ever again be charged and prosecuted. 
• Heb 8:8  …”BEHOLD, THE DAYS ARE COMING, SAYS THE LORD, WHEN I WILL MAKE A NEW COVENANT WITH THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL AND WITH THE HOUSE OF JUDAH— 13  In that He says, “A NEW COVENANT,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away. 

John 3:18  “He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

19  And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

• This is the only way left by which a man can be condemned – love of darkness and rejection of Jesus.

Romans 8:1  There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

• If we are in Christ, we cannot be condemned.

Rom 8:33 TPT  Who then would dare to accuse those whom God has chosen in love to be his? God himself is the judge who has issued his final verdict over them—“Not guilty!”

• No charges against us can stick. The judge as already given his verdict.

Romans 8:38  For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come,

39  nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

• God cannot connect himself or His love to sin. However, in an act of love, God disconnected us from sin and all condemnation for it so that He can now be justified in connecting his love to us. Because there is no longer any condemnation to us, there is nothing that can ever separate us from God’s love.