Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from Him. Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking divine rules”, but the very first of the ten commandments is to “have no other gods before me”. So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things into ultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose and happiness than your relationship to God.

In more traditional cultures, the sense of worth and identity comes from fulfilling duties to family and giving service to society. In our contemporary individualistic culture, we tend to look to our achievements, our social status, our talents or our love relationships. If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralysed with fear. If you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as a failure as long as you live. Only if your identity is built on God and his love, can you have a sense that can venture anything, face anything.

Remember this- if you don’t live for Jesus you will live for something else. If you live for your career and you don’t do it well, it may punish you for the rest of your life, and you will feel like a failure. If you live for your children and they don’t turn out alright you could be absoloutely in torment because you feel absoloutely worthless as a person. If Jesus is your centre and Lord, and you fail Him, He will forgive you. Your career can’t die for your sins. Even the most successful careers and families can’t give the significance, security and affirmation that the author of glory and love can. Everybody has to live for something. Whatever that something is becomes the Lord of your life, whether you think of it that way or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive Him, will fulfil you completely, and if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.