Sin is a loaded word. For those outside the faith, it’s a funny and dated religious term. For Christians, we repeat it so often that it loses its bite. Scripture reveals that sin is worse than we know. Jesus is so serious about it that he says, “If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.” What is it about sin that’s so fatal it would require Jesus to go to the cross?
This Lent we do a soul examination, studying all the ways God describes the complex of sin. Lawlessness, adultery, rebellion . . . The cancerous nature of sin means that we need to go deeper than surface confession. The problem is worse than we know, which makes our Savior greater than we can imagine.
Invocation
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, who delivers us from all evil.
Invitation Prayer
Lord, evil often comes from those closest to us. Peter denied you and Judas betrayed you. You know the pain of evil that comes from your friends. Comfort us when we are hurt by those we love. Lord Jesus, without you we fall. With you, we stand. Stay with us, Amen.
Word
1 John 3:3
“And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
Meditation: The Power of Hope by Megan Roegner
I think that everyone who was teaching in the fall semester of 2021 needs a tattoo of the little Facebook “marked safe” flag or a t-shirt that says, “I survived Devious Licks.”
For those of you who are fortunate enough to be unaware of this phenomenon, a “devious lick” was a TikTok challenge in which a student stole or vandalized something from their school, usually from the bathroom, and posted a picture or video of it on social media. For a couple of months, soap dispensers, toilet paper, toilet seats, and so on, disappeared from schools across America.
It was a season of lawlessness.
Now, none of my students admitted to participating in any of this vandalism and theft. Most of them were extremely frustrated by their “devious” peers. What made the situation even more frustrating is that the fall semester of 2021 was supposed to be a return to “normal,” more or less. After two school years radically altered by Covid, we were starting in person, all together. But there was a destructive force at work, and it wasn’t just TikTok.
In reading 1 John 3, I was struck by how the concepts of hope and purification are opposed to the concepts of sinning and lawlessness: “And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:3-4). I’m wondering if we should think of lawlessness as being caused by the absence of hope.
If we recall the fall of 2021 (which already seems so long ago), kids had just experienced two years of disrupted peer relationships and activities during important developmental stages. They had lived in fear and uncertainty and felt alone. There were moments of hopelessness in their near past that lingered in the present. Many young people also feel hopelessness when they think about their future, as fears about environmental, social, political, and economic issues abound.
I am worried about many of those same issues. But in the midst of my fears, I am comforted by the abounding hope that faith in a loving, merciful, all-powerful God provides. I don’t need to turn to the chaos of lawlessness to find an outlet for my frustration and fear because I believe that in the age-old battle of good versus evil, good wins: good has already won.
Martin Luther King said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is an idea I cling to when life looks bleak. We can hang on to hope even when we don’t know when it will be fulfilled. We can trust that the steps hope propels us to take are part of a longer journey, a journey into the arms of a loving Savior.
Jesus, help me keep my hope in you. Let this hope shine like a light in the darkness I encounter. Amen.
Sending
Lord, in the face of evil, you call us from death to life, from silence to speech, from idleness to action. Go with us now. Send us with your gifts. Sustain us by your promise. Amen.