todd nelson

Preaching on Ash Wednesday is like preaching to the proverbial choir. You want to follow Jesus closely. You desire to know him, love him, serve him more and more. So, let me say something that may feel heretical, but I’d ask you to hang in there with me. One choir member to another.

Sin is our hope. Please hear me out.

Sin is the blinking light in our life that tells us something is amiss just like the dashboard light which tells us that the car is in need of repair. In the times we sin, or miss the mark of God, we discover the limitations of our willpower, goodness and strength. That moment actually invites us to trust him more. The moments we veer off the course we find that the desires of our heart are not always aligned toward love of God or neighbor but of building our own life in our own image. That invites us to trust ourselves less. 

Trusting him more and ourselves less is the place of hope. Sin is therefore a place to start healing not a dead end of condemnation.

We Christians are often a guilt-based and apologetic people. And it is hurting our discipleship. We would rather feel bad about things for a moment than change. Our chronic guilt is the price we willingly pay because the price of change seems too costly. We would rather shift the deck chairs around and go down with the ship than admit things are wrong and repent. Admitting that there is a gaping hole in the hull of our life is just too traumatic to admit and/or fix. So, instead we put on airs of religiosity that we have everything figured out. Our religious practices are just public enough that others won’t wonder about us. Jesus knew this would be a temptation..so he included the warning in his Sermon on the Mount.

Vainglory, the first of the seven deadly sins we will examine this lent, says that I care more about my appearance than I do anything else…including my relationship with God. It is the excessive and disordered desire for recognition and approval of others. Vain meaning worthless. Glory means illumination, honor, or highlight.  It is vain…worthless to worry about my image than to be formed into the image of Christ. It is vain…worthless to struggle with the surface issues when the deeper patterns of sin aren’t dealt with. As CS Lewis once noticed, we content ourselves with making mud pies instead of dining at the feast God prepares. 

As we enter this lenten season, these 40 days of preparing our lives to receive the power of the resurrected Christ, we have a choice. We can reorder the deck chairs or we can fix the boat. We can be satisfied with mud pies or we can choose the feast that Christ prepares. We can focus on the worthless vain things on the surface or we can do the deep work of introspection that leads to God’s glory being revealed in us.

If it is the latter we seek then, in the strangest of ways, sin is our hope. For in it is the illumination of what our heart idolizes; what our life struggles with; and where our true desires are placed. It is a doorway to healing and wholeness.

This Lent we will examine closely these seven doorways (IE. Seven Deadly Sins) to a deeper life with Christ. Are we brave enough to allow the Spirit to point out how we are entangled? If so, we will find the path of Jesus leading to freedom. It will not be easy, comfortable or enjoyable. But that was never God’s intention. His goal is to form us into the image of his son our Savior. FULL STOP. But to do that we must be willing to set aside the sin of vainglory. Let us not worry or work on our image but instead embrace his.

Acknowledging our sin and using it to examine our lives is exactly the way to do that. In a weird way sin really is our hope.