Make the effort to improve yourself, and you run immediately into a wall.
Namely, you.
Why is that? It’s not as if this is an uncommon experience, and only a few people run into trouble trying to change themselves. No, it’s universal. If you’ve at all tried to change anything about you, you know this painful reality.
What is it about you, exactly, that causes the issue? The Apostle Paul had a category for your problem in Romans 7. He called it “the law of sin that dwells in my members.”
We’re spending time in this space exploring the untapped power of living a holy life. And no discussion of holiness can carry on for long without addressing sin–what it does, where it lives, and how to fight it.
What sin does
When we talk about sin on the popular level, we tend to stay on the surface. The message sent is “Sin, bad. Stop it.”
This isn’t untrue, but it is incomplete.
It would be like going to the doctor and hearing, “Listen, what you have is really bad, and you need to stop it. Thanks for coming in today. You can pay on the way out.” Your questions would double, your fear would triple.
No one will overcome sin by being told to stop. I can’t stop eating donuts even though I have been told they are bad for me. I need a more complete, compelling, and actionable discussion about where I am, where that will take me, and what I was made for.
The word translated most often as sin in the New Testament is hamartia (ha-mar-tee-uh). It’s a word from archery and means “to miss.” When the New Testament tells us all humans are sinners—translated—it is telling us all humans are missers. We miss the target—intentionally and unintentionally.
What is the target? Jesus is clear: Love for God (see the Great Commandment) and love for my neighbor—broadly defined as every other person outside me (see the parable of the Good Samaritan).
We miss this.
On purpose and on accident.
All the time.
It’s the human condition in a word. We miss.
Why wasn’t I kind to you?
I didn’t want to be. I didn’t care about you. I wasn’t interested in being focused on you. You weren't important enough to me for me to consider you.
OR
My own pain spoke too loudly. I didn’t know how. My upbringing didn’t contain kindness. I was distracted by my phone, my interests, or my trauma.
So, intentionally or not, I miss loving you, my neighbor. I sin against you.
It’s why Paul in Romans 3:23 tellingly says all of us have missed and come up short of the beauty and glory of God. And what is that? A life fully and completely marked by and able to express love. This is God’s glory, and so the target of our lives.
Understanding the background of the word, you can just see the archer standing there at the Olympic final, dejected and sad he didn’t have what it took to get the arrow all the way there.
It fell short. Like we do.
It’s why both the person who lies and the person who shames and condemns the one who lies are sinners.
The one who lies is missing the mark of loving the God of truth and loving their neighbor enough to keep the bonds of trust solid. While the one who condemns and shames them for it is missing the mark of loving their neighbor who is frail and loving God by trying to usurp God’s role as judge.
Misser and judger alike stand guilty of missing.
Sinners we are, all of us.
Herman Melville had it: “Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
Where does sin live?
The Apostle Paul gives a master class on sin in Romans 6, 7 and 8. Romans 7:23 is like a comment from a good doctor who explains your diagnosis in detail.
Here is the verse in context, then we’ll pull it apart.
“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”
Romans 7:21-23
It’s Paul’s explanation of the universal experience of running into yourself when you try to change. Try this summary on:
-I find a “law” at work every time I want do a right and good thing.
-It’s this: another force comes in, a force that wants to undo me (Paul: “evil”).
-I want in my heart of hearts to do the good thing, truly.
-BUT
and here he says something hard to get our heads around. He locates where sin “lives”. Listen to Paul’s exact words:
-“I see in my members (literally, “my body parts”) another law waging war”.
-In other words, at the exact moment I want to do what’s right, something in my body wars against me.
-It fights against even what I tell myself to do–what my mind says.
-It’s so powerful, it traps me inside myself.
-I find that the problem is literally “in my members.” Sin lives there. The miss is in my body.
Think of it like this. Sin is a pathology. If you have an auto-immune disease, you can tell yourself all the right things, want to be well, but literally, your body works against you. The pathology is “in your members,” trying to kill you. It fights against you and traps you. You can’t excise it by telling it to stop. You can even want it to stop, and it won’t.
This confirms what all fields have discovered. Our body holds our issues.
Trauma
Addiction
Bitterness
Anger
PTSD
Family dynamics
The miss is in us.
It’s no surprise that a few verses later, he laments, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
As a society, we've categorically judged sin. “Sin” and “sinner” are to us insults. And we want none of that. Christians—especially in the West—have accepted this judgement and amplified it with a superficial understanding of sin as a kind of “naughtiness” to avoid. As a result, the above list feels like accusation and blame.
So, none of us can hear Paul's description about how native our problem is. We miss that when the Bible talks about sin, it is not—despite many having done exactly this—attaching a judgmental label, it is describing the deepest human problem.
It’s why we both excuse and ignore sin.
“I can’t help it.”
“It’s just me.”
“Can you blame them?”
“Everybody struggles with this.”
“What do you mean that’s wrong? It’s how I feel.”
And it’s why we try to make ideas and ideologies into saviors from sin without recognizing how they fail to account for the human condition of missing.
For example, adopting conservatism won't rid the world of moral evil.
And without recognizing the pathology of sin, in the name of values like personal responsibility and free markets, it will only cloak greed as a good.
And adopting progressivism won't rid society of inequality and injustice.
Because without recognizing how deeply sin’s pathology is baked into our members, it will only deepen the gap by creating new categories like “enlightened” and “unenlightened.”
No idea or ideology will save us from ourselves. But we think they will.
And we always have. Why?
Because we miss. We are missers.
It's why as soon as you set out to be a holy person, you find yourself trapped by something you can’t fully measure–the miss baked into your members, ready to fight you.
How do we fight it?
We’ll talk about that next time.
Pastor Scott Marshall, Wichita First Church of the Nazarene