Sin Is Personal

Yesterday we thought about how sin is social. It’s a way of constructing our together that’s unjust - like the unjust laws that Isaiah prophesied about or like redlining in Long Beach that set up a race-based neighborhood system that kept certain groups of people under resourced.

The scripture is also clear that sin is personal. It’s individual actions that we take that hurt ourselves and others and which dishonor God and mistreat our world. One of the challenges of talking about personal sin is that it so easily turns into a shame-fest as we condemn ourselves or a judgment-fest when we condemn others. Neither of those is helpful in the long run because they just heap more muck on the image of God in each of us!

One of the ways that sin is talked about is an analogy to disconnecting from the fresh, life-giving water from God by trying to save up barrels of water for ourselves so we don’t need God. Jeremiah put it like this:

My people have committed two sins:

They have forsaken me,

    the spring of living water,

and have dug their own cisterns,

    broken cisterns that cannot hold water. - Jeremiah 2:13

This is a great picture of how sin works: instead of God being angry and judgmental, God is pictured as life-giving. The issue is that we break ourselves when we go our own way, disregarding the good and healthy way of life that’s in Christ. A cistern was an underground water barrel - but even in the best of times (when it wasn’t broken and leaky) it was stale compared to the ‘living water’ of a fresh stream.

What does this image say to you about your own personal sin? Can you sense the ways in which you are actively or passively disconnecting from God in order to control situations, manipulate people, or even manage yourself?