IMG_0664I recently read a Christian blog post regarding the releasing of confidential records from the Ashley Madison marital cheating website.  The writer, a self-avowed Christian, said that, in dealing with the people who were “outed” by the information breach, now is not the time to talk about sin.  I have heard this phrase “now is not the time to talk about sin” used over and over in similar circumstances, particularly when high-profile Christians are caught in indiscretions. My question is: “If we can’t talk about sin now, than when?”

It seems that a large portion of American Christianity is becoming adverse to talking about sin. We are all about telling folks about Christ’s love for them.  We repeat John 3:16 over and over to them and beg them to receive God’s love for them. Sadly, we never tell them why, we never tell them that unless they repented of their sin, their afterlife will be very, very unpleasant, to say the least. I’ve had elders of churches tell me that I shouldn’t talk about sin when unbelievers are around because it might sound judgmental. He wanted us to only talk about how loving God is.  Not even Jesus did that.  When it came to sin Jesus was very confrontational. In fact the first words of His earthly ministry (Mark 1:15) were a call to repentance. Well, before someone repents there must be a discussion of sin and an acknowledgement that one is a sinner. Yet, many American Christians, rather than appear “judgmental” would want the unsaved to “accept Christ’s love for them” and then worry about repenting later on. They ignore the fact that without repenting of sin first the unsaved sinner is still an unsaved sinner.

In the blog post that I mentioned above the author implies, but never actually says, that talk of sin should be avoided until there has been a long time of healing. The author says that the work of the church must be centered on healing the family. But unless there is a sound understanding that what happened was a grievous sin, then how can any reunification of the family occur?  If there is no discussion of the sinful act that divided the family and perhaps even the church, then how can there be any repentance, the only thing that will bring healing?

Yet, our church services are full of preaching about the extravagant love of God.  God the wonderful love bunny, the God who chuckles like a kindly old uncle when we miss the mark. We hear this so often that we think that God’s response to our sin amounts to Him patting us on the head and saying “That’s okay, just try to do better next time.” Nothing could be further from the biblical truth. The reason that we can talk about His grace and love is that God is highly incensed at our sin, indeed is enraged by it, but He restrains His anger by His own choice because we have a mediator in Christ Jesus. Our hearts should break when we consider our daily sins, perhaps even have a momentary shot of fear of facing His unrestrained rage, but we can take joy in the relief of knowing that Christ paid our penalty–He received God’s rage instead of us.

I used to think that the least preached upon subject in the church today was the topic of Heaven.  Indeed, statistics say it is rarely spoken of in any manner in church sermons. But I now believe that the least talked about subject, in the American church at least, is how God feels about sin.  When I bring this up with pastors and elders the usual response is “well, everyone knows that He doesn’t like sin”. I don’t think that they do–and the greater number of them just don’t comprehend the degree of hate and rage that God feels for sin and unrepentant sinners.  When I have people read or hear Jonathan Edwards’ masterful sermon “Sinners in The Hands of An Angry God” they often recoil in horror. But they don’t recoil in horror at their own tenuous state in the hands of God Almighty. Rather, they recoil that anyone would talk about stuff like that in today’s church.  Well, by having that attitude they are demonstrating the reasons why the church in the West, and America in particular, is failing:  1.) we no longer talk about sin, and 2.) we don’t call it out when it occurs.

A friend of mine likes to point out that the church in America is broken and totally out of sync with what God’s church is supposed to be.  He likes to say that the small churches in impoverished Third World countries have it all over us in terms of being “real churches” like what God intended. I disagree with him except on this one point: those impoverished Third World churches don’t hesitate to talk about sin and calling it out in their midst. We do. The evidence can be seen in the fact that in the USA there is little difference in the divorce rate between Christians and non-Christians. Many, many pastors in the USA have a pornography problem. Our kids go off to college and become ex-Christians. That is, in my opinion, the result of our watering down any talk of sin. We water it down to the point that our attitude towards sin is no different from our culture’s attitude. The only difference is that we have “received God’s love for us”, but to no measurable effect. Then we wonder why our leaders and fellow congregants seem so cavalier about sin.

Yet, in spite of all of this, our churches believe that if we looked MORE like the surrounding society we would be more successful in reaching it. Our modern praise and worship music (a lot of it I like as music but find it weak on praise and worship) only rarely mentions our sinfulness and need for repentance. Almost all of it relates to God’s never-ending love for us implying, as it were, that He takes an easy-going view of sin.  I highly doubt that if some songwriter penned a song that talks about God raging at sin and thus worshiping Him for that, that it would ever be heard outside of his own studio.

So, we end up with Christians looking down their noses at churches that preach against sin. We call them “Westboro Christians” after the anti-homosexual protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church. (By the way, it is neither “Baptist” nor a “church”.) We shake our heads thinking that churches that preach about sin and repentance are backwards hicks somehow missing out on preaching the Gospel. I have no way of proving this, but my best guess is that the congregants who sit in those churches know the Gospel far better than the average American Christian.  They also are less likely to commit a sin that divides the family, too. One thing that I do know is that by having a clear understanding of God’s rage at sin, they know far better than most what His grace is and how incredible His love is for us.