Dr. Nathan Leasure
One of the issues many have noticed in the church in the last few decades is the lack of the use of the word “sin.” Some suggest this began to happen when the word became overused, being applied to a vast list of actions not found in the Bible by fundamentalists Christians. This overuse created a kickback, where the term became underused. A psychiatrist by the name of Karl Menninger wrote an important book in 1973 called “Whatever Happened to Sin?” and drew some attention to the issue. That book became a best-seller. Menninger was not a preacher or religious leader but he became concerned about the loss of the word for mental health reasons. Then in 2000, an influential Episcopal priest, named Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book titled “Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation,” While she is not a Bible thumper by any means of the imagination, her thesis was that the loss of “sin” in our vocabularies will be catastrophic on many levels.
Why is the loss of the word “sin” such a concern to Menninger, Taylor, and others? The reason is simply this: whatever you call a behavior determines how you will treat it.
For instance, if we call something a crime—what does that mean? Well, if it’s a crime then we punish it. Menninger looks back to the time in our history when sin was called a crime. Among the early Puritans, drunks were locked in the public stocks in the middle of town. Other sinners or criminals had monograms of their sins branded on their faces or clothing.
In our culture, it is not uncommon to hear sin called mistake. Yet, if we call sin a mistake, how do we treat a mistake? Well, we overlook it or teach a person how to avoid repeating the error. The answer is usually education. Others refer to sin as a sickness or mental issue. What does this designation imply? Well, if a person is sick they need medications or therapy.
However, sin is more complex than any of these categories. It is true that sin is punished by God, that we need teaching to help us avoid sinning, and that there are physical and mental issues that can be helped through medicine and good counseling. Yet sin is far more than any single category. It is human rebellion against our Creator, refusing to submit our will to His, missing the moral mark, and wandering from the right path. Ultimately, it results from a deformity of the heart which has made us self-centered, self-indulgent creatures who want to rule our own lives. The cure for sin is atonement and the indwelling presence of God in our lives. What we need is forgiveness that can only come from the sacrifice of Jesus Christ; and the working of God in our lives that changes our hearts and empowers us to say no to our own desires.
The great concern is that the loss of the word “sin” will ultimately cause us to forget the cure for sin, which is the greatest tragedy we can experience. For with the loss of the cure, we can have no hope of salvation in this life or the life to come.
Dr. Nathan Leasure is the Senior Pastor at the First Church of God in Greeneville, TN. He has degrees from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Anderson University, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is married to Jenny and they have four children- Ava, Olivia, Maria, and Samuel.