In every culture or society, we have a concept of right and wrong. It is something that is fundamental to our understanding of the world. We know that helping an old lady to cross the road is morally right, and stealing an old lady’s handbag is morally wrong. Whatever your background, religion or ethnicity, we know that there is some kind of standard that we should be living by. C. S. Lewis put it like this in his book Mere Christianity;
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“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet.”
Often, as humans, we try to put this standard into something we can easily measure. We try to quantify it and write rules and laws to show us what it looks like to live according to the standard. In Christianity we use the word “sin” to describe what happens when we don’t meet the standard. The Bible is full of laws which tell us what sin is, and how to avoid it. In fact there are over 613 commandments, or laws in the first 5 books of the Bible alone. It could be safe to say that that is a pretty comprehensive guideline on how to live a sin free life.
Recently I spent some time in the interactive prayer room at my church. Usually I am in there every week, but for whatever reason I’ve not been able to be in there for just over a month. As I walked in to the room, the first thing I saw, in big letters, was the word “CONFESS”. Immediately I started listing in my head all the rules that I had broken over the past month. As I said in my last blog, the last few months have been hard and I’ve made plenty of mistakes and done some stupid things, so had plenty to list. However as I was making my list I heard the voice of God say very clearly, “Sin isn’t about your behaviour, it’s about the direction of your heart.”
Sin isn’t about your behaviour, it’s about the direction of your heart.
You see, when Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment in the whole of the law, he summed up the entirety of the law in 2 statements:
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“And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.’”
Love God.
Love others as you love yourself.
All of morality summed up in one word, “Love”.
I think what Jesus is saying here, and what his whole ministry was about, is that the rules aren’t there to be a legal checklist of things you can and can’t do, that when you die God is going to mark your life against and that will determine where you end up. Jesus is saying that the law is just there to help us to know what it might look like to live a life of love. A life where the direction of our heart is towards bringing love to God and to those around us, with every decision we make.
All of the rules and laws in the Bible were given in a specific context, to a specific group of people at a specific time. They show us what it looked like to live a radical and set apart life of love for God and others in that culture. Some of these are still relevant today, like not murdering, but some mean something totally different and are a long way from living a life of radical love. God is taking us on a journey which is moving more and more towards his love and his purpose for humanity.
When we sin, we turn our backs on love and focus on ourselves and what we want. We turn away from honouring God and championing others with our decisions, and just think about what we can gain or how we feel. As the church, we spend far too much time penalising or judging people and ourselves for breaking rules, when we should be showing love.
What if we realised that sin isn’t about our behaviour?
What if we realised that blindly following the rules is only making us feel guilty, shameful and pushing people away?
And what if we decided that we would align the direction of our hearts with love? Loving God, and loving others as we love ourselves.
Let’s stop trying to measure our morality against a rule book, and instead follow the example of Jesus and live lives of relentless love.
