Does Your Sin Define You?

I. Introduction

“That’s Curtis, he’s as nice as the day is long and he’ll gladly give you the shirt off his back. He got involved in meth a few years ago, cooking it and selling it, and he wound up doing some time for it; but he’s really turned his life around now.”

This was how I was introduced to the young man who was fixing the sign where my wife works which was damaged by the recent storms this Spring. The thing is, I didn’t know this young man from Adam, but the store manager, who was doing the introductions, decided that I needed to know that while he was a nice guy, he had also gone to jail for the production and distribution of meth. At the time I thought was a strange way to introduce someone and now, as I put it down on paper, I’m even more struck by it.

What possible benefit would it have done for me to know this young man’s dark past? Since he lives in Monett, it was pretty likely that I would never see him again or, at least, pretty certain that my contact with him would be very limited. From what I could tell, I saw no benefit in that knowledge. Then, I started noticing in other conversations with other people, how a third party (who was usually not present) would be described. There was usually some gracious remark made about them only to be followed up by some wrong that had done in the past: “He’s very handsome but he’s on wife number four and he’s cheating on her.” or “She’s a great mother now, but before she got married, she got pregnant and had an abortion.” or “Well of course he knows everything about cars, he used to steal them and sell them for parts!”

Then, shortly after that, I was in an on-line conversation with a friend who was considering going into the ministry. Knowing how much he had grown in his faith in the last several years as well as how good a public speaker he is, I told him I thought it was great idea. However, he was having doubts because of his wild days when he was in college, drinking and doing drugs. While he’s left all that behind him now, gotten married and has a great family, he still sees those sins in his past as real and valid justification preventing him from serving God in a greater capacity.

“You cannot let what you did twenty years ago dictate the direction of your life today,” I told him. “You are not the same person you were back then and you have no intention of ever becoming that person ever again, right?”

“Well, no, of course not,” He responded.

“Then why would you allow that person to decide what’s happening in your life today?”

Still my friend was left unconvinced. He had made up his mind that the things that he had done in college, sins that he had long since asked forgiveness for, were his burden to carry around with him the rest of his life. The fact is, though, my friend is not alone. A lot of us are in the very same boat that he is, letting something from our past, some dark secret that no one should ever know, rule our lives. And if that weren’t enough, even if we’ve made peace with our past sins, there are still those who won’t let us forget about it. In some cases, like Curtis, the young man I met the other day, his sins have become a public record that should be known by everyone, regardless of whether it matters or not.

So, how about all of you? Do you have a past that you can’t let go of? Do you have a sin that you can’t get past though God forgave you long ago? Or perhaps you’re like Curtis, where your past sins keep crashing in on your present?

But most importantly, does sin define who you are?

II. Defining Sin

However, before we get too deep into our topic, we need to figure out what, exactly, is sin?

Reverend Billy Graham calls sin is “…any thought or action that falls short of God’s will. God is perfect, and anything we do that falls short of His perfection is sin.” Because of the history of the Bible, we see the nature of sin and its impact on mankind and his relationship with God and, in that, we begin to understand two basic concepts about sin.

The first is that sin can be considered a transgression. In the King James version, 1 John 3:4 tells us:

Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law.

Where a transgression means “to step across” or “to go beyond a set boundary”, in this case it would be man’s stepping across of beyond the boundaries set in place by God and His Holy Law. In this concept, the rule, or boundary, that God has put down for us is clear and one that we should never accidentally or intentionally want to step over or else we would face a penalty of death.

The other concept is that sin can be considered “missing the mark” or “coming up short”. Romans 3:23 tells us:

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;

In the case of this concept, God has given us a set of targets or goals in order to have a life without sin; to miss the mark or to come short of the goal would also mean facing the penalty of death.

Having a better understanding of God’s law gives us a better understanding of sin. As Paul said in Romans 7:7:

“What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.”

And then in Romans 3:19-20:

“Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.”

With a better understanding of sin through God’s law, we then have a better means to avoid sin. And, by avoiding sin, we never give it a chance to define us.

III. Letting Others Use Our Sin to Define Us

One of the ways that we let our sin define us is by letting others use our sin to define us. Using the example of Curtis the welder, that I spoke about earlier, I’m certain that my wife’s store manager had no idea there was any harm in what she was saying. In fact, I’m pretty certain that, in her own way, she was complimenting Curtis for turning his life around.

But how many of us have either done the same thing or heard someone do the same thing? We use a person’s past sins in our introduction of them or in referring to them in some way.

“Oh, that’s Jack. He used to be so nice before he got drunk and wrecked his car into that semi,” or “Sure, Ted’s an amazing athlete, but you have to wonder if it’s all his talent or if it’s coming from the steroids?”

Even in the Bible, we see people who are forever frozen in history by the mention of their name and their sin in God’s Holy Word, as we see in 1 Kings 16:9:

His servant Zimri, commander of half his chariots, conspired against him. Now he was at Tirzah drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, who was over the household at Tirzah. Then Zimri went in and struck him and put him to death in the twenty-seventh year of Asa king of Judah, and became king in his place.

Here is a man who made himself king by getting drunk and killing the previous king. As we remarked in our Sunday School class a few weeks ago, what a way to be remembered for all of eternity?

But the fact is how others perceive us, especially if we have a “checkered past” that is well-known, is hard to overcome. As Christians, it’s even harder because that past life that we led, the one that most people know us by, is contradictory to the message we’re trying to share. We attempt to tell people how becoming a Christian has changed our lives and we’re viewed as hypocrites.

One example of this is in the story of Rahab from Joshua chapter 2. Regardless of which version of the Bible you read, Rahab’s checkered past is already there in how she is described. The King James and the New American Standard versions call her a harlot, the NIV and the Amplified versions call her a prostitute, and the Wycliffe version calls her a whore. However, by the end of her story, she not only professes her belief in God, but, according to the Gospel of Matthew, she later marries Salmon and is listed as one of four women in the linage from Abraham to David and from David to Jesus. God didn’t care what sins were in Rahab’s past, He only cared about what was in her future.

While there’s a lot that can be taken from Rahab’s story, I believe this lesson is one of the most important ones. How others perceive us is only limited by what they know of us. Other people only have the things of our past and our present with which to judge us by, God has the advantage of knowing our past, our present, and our future. Our story isn’t complete until the day we die. From now until that day is what is important to God regardless of what sins we may have committed in our past.

IV. Letting Our Sin Define Us

I told you earlier about the friend I have who was considering becoming a minister but didn’t think he should because of the things he’d done in college. He believed that his use of alcohol and drugs disqualified him from preaching the Word of God. His overwhelming guilt of what he had done twenty years ago prevented him from serving God with the very talents that God had given him. He became a Christian shortly after college and became very active in his church. He married and had a small family who were also active in their church. But this whole time, while he was serving God to the best of his ability, he carried around this feeling of inadequacy and shame because of the things he had done years before. He was letting his past sin define who he is today and, in doing so, he was denying himself the opportunity to serve God in a greater capacity.

In Ephesians 4:17-24, Paul tells us:

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and that you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

In this passage, Paul is telling us that, now that we have become Christians, we can no longer live in the same manner that the sinners around us live. The sinners around us continue as they were before, living their lives apart from God because they refuse to see the glory that is in it, because they refuse to give up the lifestyle they’ve grown accustomed to, or because they prefer the sinful pleasures that come with a sinful life.

But Paul goes on to tell us that once we have given ourselves over to Christ, once we have become believers, we no longer WANT to live in that way. We gladly will give up our old lives and all the corruption that came with it in order to live our lives in righteousness as God intended us to be.

Take a few seconds to look around the church. Look at the person sitting next to you. The person behind you. If you’re in the front, look back at the person in the back row. If you’re in the back, look at all the people in the rows in front of you. Look around at all the people in this church.

Do you know what you saw as you looked around? Sinners. That’s right, sinners. There’s not a single person here, myself included, that didn’t commit a sin this morning, yesterday, last week, or even in the last year. Not one single person walked into this church this morning who didn’t have a sin that they were burdened by and if I asked for volunteers to stand up and tell us what that sin was, I sincerely believe I wouldn’t have very many takers.

There’s not a single one of us who doesn’t struggle with the guilt of some past sin. But, if you’ve professed your belief in Jesus Christ and asked forgiveness for that sin, then that sin shouldn’t bother you any longer. Romans 6:5-7 tells us:

For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

The enemy hates that. One of the enemy’s best tricks is to make us believe that some sin that we committed in our past is so great that not even God can forgive it. And boy, does he get a lot of mileage out of that one. Enough so, that he can get us to believe that even the blood of Jesus was not enough to wash away our sin. And by believing in that, we prevent ourselves from the freedom that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

But we know better. 1 John 1:9 tells us:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

He will “…cleanse us from ALL unrighteousness”, not just a few of our sins, not just the ones that He can handpick and leave the others; He will cleanse us from ALL of them. If this weren’t true, the why did Jesus have to die on the cross? God’s law tells us that the price for sin is death and that the only sacrifice that can cleanse us of those sins is a blood sacrifice. Jesus’ blood. The Man who refused all temptation, the Man who was the spotless lamb, had to have His blood spilled to wash away the sins of the entire world, past, present, and future. His sacrifice was greater than any of your sins no matter how great they may seem and, for that, Jesus HAD to die on the cross.

V. Conclusion

Romans 8:37-39 tells us:

But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There’s not one of us who, at one time or another, felt like my friend does because we are all sinners. None of us are perfect. We will, or have, all done things that we want to kick ourselves for later on because we know that we’ve failed God. It’s perhaps one of the hardest things for a Christian to admit. That overwhelming feeling of shame that what we have done in our past invalidates the love and forgiveness that God has provided for us.

But that’s all a lie. A lie told to us by our enemy in order to separate us from the life that God wants us to lead. And when that lie gets in to our hearts, it’s hard to let go of. We begin to see our sin as a veil that prevents us from seeing the future. We begin to wallow in the past, unable to break free from it. It becomes like a ball and chain shackled to our ankle, keeping us moving forward. Eventually, we become a slave to it, carrying it around on our backs like a huge weight. It effects our work, our play, our family time, our time in prayer, and our time in worship. We begin to question why we even come to church. We literally become a slave to that sin that defines our lives.

We cannot think this way. Yes, there was a time when our sins may have defined who we were and what we thought; but that time ended when we accepted Jesus Christ as our savior. Our sins, ALL of our sins, were forgiven.

Again, Romans 6:4-7 says:

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

Our old selves, the sinful and corrupt people that we once were, have been buried with Jesus in the tomb. And three days later, when He arose from that tomb, like Him, we arose as well, a new creature, forgiven of our sins.

A few days ago, we celebrated America’s Independence Day. The day that we declared independence from British rule. This morning, I can think of no better time than to declare your independence from the slavery of sin. If you have a burden that you wish to free yourself of, would you contact me? Today is the best day to redefine yourself, so you let go of your sin and let your life be defined by Christ.