I’ve been thinking a lot about sin lately. Light and fluffy topic, I know.

The truth is that for most of my life, I don’t think I really understood what sin was and had trouble identifying it in my life. This is NOT to say I was “sinless” but that my compass was skewed. I’m a recovering pharisee. And pharisees are really good at cleaning the outside of the dish and neglecting the inside.

The problem is that my view of sin for the longest time was only about doing the wrong things…

But sin is loving the wrong things.

Loving the wrong things plays itself out in doing the wrong things to be sure, but sin, at its core, is about loving the wrong things.

This realization has helped me understand the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son…

He was lost too. He never left home, but his heart was distant from the Father. Why? The truth is that he loved himself – visible in his judgmental, self-justifying, prideful spirit at the end of the story – not the Father.

This is why Jesus so adamantly preached that obedience to the law was not only fulfilling external obligation but having the attitude of our hearts conformed to His (Matthew 5-7).

I have the privilege of directing a camp at Pine Cove where several hundred junior highers attend each week in the summer. Many of them come from churched backgrounds and are familiar with the Bible. If I had to diagnose one spiritual sickness that I’m seeing in this generation of students, it’s this…

“They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.” – Jeremiah 6:14

My fear is that many don’t really know Christ and so they don’t now peace, because they are comfortably numb. They don’t know that they’re spiritually bleeding and dying. Our “wound” is not minor, it is fatal; we are enemies of God and objects of His wrath (Eph. 2:5) apart from Christ.

If we don’t understand our sin, we don’t understand the greatness and glory of our Savior.

I think there are many who choose to place faith in Jesus but never understand the gravity of their need. When we start to realize that our motives, even at our best, are consistently tangled in the affections of sin and self, it makes the love of Jesus that much sweeter.

“Til sin be bitter, Christ will not be sweet.” – Watson