Every sin is an opportunity to receive God’s grace.
When I use the word “sin,” it isn’t a condemnation — it’s a diagnosis. All of us sin, make mistakes, get caught up in the heat of the comment or have self-destructive habits.
This could sound judgmental, but I want to shift our perspective, to see this as good news. We might hold ourselves to a difficult standard of perfection: be good all the time, be the best, always be growing, hustling, profiting. Holding yourself to any standard can be a good and healthy thing. But holding yourself to perfection is exhausting, because you’ll never truly arrive at perfection. It doesn’t exist!
In his book “Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself),” author David Zahl suggests that from a Christian perspective, instead of impossibly high expectations, we can have a more realistic view of ourselves, and even the human condition. He suggests three things about humanity we can see with a more clear-eyed view.
First, each of us are limited. We cannot be or do everything we set out to do.
Second, each of us has a divided self, caught between wanting and doing different things (for example, saying I want to be physically active, but also there is a new season of my favorite show that I’m probably going to watch in one sitting). In Romans 7, the apostle Paul says when talking about how he struggles, “I do what I don’t want to do, and I don’t do what I want to do.”
And lastly, people tend to be self-centered. And self-centered does not mean narcissistic, or explicitly selfish or greedy (though that could be the case). It means that more often than not, we tend to focus on ourselves and our interests. Each of us has limits, divided selves and self-centered focus. I find this to be an accurate description that can create connection and empathy.
And those are the reasons God seeks you. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus invites a tax-collector to be his disciple. Tax collectors would have been culturally hated in their day. Jesus then goes to dinner at the home of this new disciple, who invites other tax collectors and other social outcasts, who in the story are called sinners. When Jesus is challenged by the religious teachers about sharing a meal with these tax collectors and sinners, he responds, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick, I have come not to call the righteous (or really good people) but I came to call sinners.”
Our sin and failure are the places God wants to give grace.
Read how the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther put it: “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. He does not give any saintliness to any other but sinners, nor wisdom to any but fools. In short: he has mercy on none but the wretched and gives grace to no one but those who are in disgrace.”
If we see others as limited, divided and self-centered, it’s only because we first recognize that in ourselves. When we can see each other as having faults, have a tendency to focus on the self, and are caught between what we want and what we do, that can create understanding, clarity, curiosity, maybe even reconciliation.
an you imagine what our friendships, relationships, workplaces, marriages and even our politics would look like if we could see and accept one another’s limits and faults? Maybe we would be a bit more understanding or patient, and remember our own need for help and patience from others and from God.
Because that’s how God is toward us. God knows us and sees us in all our faults and sin, and through Christ forgives us and constantly gives us grace. Every sin and failure, every mistake and outburst, is a place where God can heal, forgive, teach and help you, because God wants to give you grace.
Ogg is the pastor of Congregational-Presbyterian Church in Lewiston.
