Admitting Sin

This week marked the end to our Heart of a Woman study. I was sad to see it come to an end! The study was hard work, but the results were noticeable! Every woman in my Small Group shared that their lives had been impacted by the study in very real ways.

This may sound strange, but I’ve been thinking a lot about sin. In fact, I may have thought about sin more in the last nine weeks than in my entire life combined! Prior to the study, I knew about sin and that I am a sinner. We all are! However, I was not aware of how much my sin impacted others, and I had little knowledge of how deeply rooted our sin can be. I also had never examined how I reacted when someone sinned against me. If someone was rude to me, or hurt me, and I snapped at them or rolled my eyes (!), I sinned in my response to that person. THAT was a huge revelation! It’s not easy to admit you are a sinner.

I know this from my own experience. We live in a culture that worships perfectionism, and we don’t want to admit we are flawed. The idea of sin sounds unpleasant and in our human weakness, we want to deny it even exists. We tell ourselves we are basically good, and that that is good enough. Besides, everyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe, and as long as someone is not “hurting” anyone, why should any behavior, thought, or attitude be considered wrong or sinful? Our pride blinds us.

And this leads us to the spool of thread. Obedience to God requires submission. Submission requires humility. Humility requires admission of sin. And all this is in complete opposition to the messages of our culture.

The bottom line is that we all answer to someone. To whom do you answer? A child answers to his/her parents. An employee answers to a manager. A soldier answers to his captain. You can follow this logic as high up as you can go in any hierarchy. The reality is we all answer to GOD. God is our creator. So, like a child, we answer to our heavenly Father.

There is a reason and a purpose to your life and mine. We are here to bring glory to God our Father. We do this when we are humbly submitting to His authority, by loving Him through obedience to His Word. In Christ, It is possible to adopt a posture of humility. We must be willing to admit our lives may be hard because of choices we have made or unconfessed sin in our lives. In Christ, we can submit to God’s authority and follow Him. And He can replace the hard, dry land of any heart with rich, fertile soil that will grow an unimaginable garden.

Growing in Grace