Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin

I want to start and end the talk today with one of the oldest prayers in the church. It’s actually dated back to Jesus.

This is actually called the Jesus Prayer. It’s simply, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

The sting, of course, is in those last two words.

That’s my story.

Not just, “I failed to actualize my growth potential,” or “I’ve committed errors in judgment.”

I’m a wrongdoer, a damage causer, a moral fraud.

It’s a very humbling statement. “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

It’s very counter to our therapeutic culture.

We’ve been in this series about statements people often think are in the Bible, but they’re really not.

And we’ve been talking about how thinking about them can help us understand God better.

The statement we’ll look at today is — “Love the Sinner; Hate the Sin.”

We hear this one a lot, don’t we?

Some people get really attached to it. A friend knows someone who likes it so much he actually had it tattooed on his arm.

But it’s not in the Bible.

It seems biblical. Sin is a bad thing. We’re all sinners. And we’re supposed to love everyone. But it’s not actually in the Bible.

And I think sometimes it’s used in a way that can be misleading.

So I want to walk through this statement in two parts.

We’ll talk about loving sinners and how important that is in the second part. I want to start with, “Hate the sin.”

The writers of Scripture have a lot to say about sin.

According to the writers of Scripture, how widespread is sin? Does anyone have any idea?

Very widespread.

In Romans, Paul says:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

According to the writers of Scripture, how damaging is sin?

It’s very damaging.

For the wages of sin is death. (Romans 6:23)

The result of or the outcome of sin is death.

According to the writers of Scripture, how seriously should we struggle against sin?

Very seriously.

James put it like this:

Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. (James 4:8)

Really? Is it that serious?

Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (James 4:9-10)

When we enter into the world of the Bible, we enter into another kind of world in understanding the moral weight of the human condition.

Because the writers of Scripture believe sin is cunning and baffling and terribly destructive to human wellbeing and our world, they have many words to describe it.

Kind of like people who live up north are supposed to have many words for snow. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the writers of Scripture have a lot of words for sins.

I want to run through some of them to help us all understand this word better.

One word describes sin as wandering off of the path — like when you take a wrong turn and you end up going where you never wanted to be. Sin is that way. You end up someplace in your life and think, “How did I ever get here?”

A very common word in the New Testament for sin is missing the mark.

They used a word that described an archer with bad aim where the arrow went where the archer did not want the arrow to go.

You do not want to be standing near the target if the archer has bad aim. Mis-shot arrows do damage, and sin is that way.

I say and do and become what I never intended to… and didn’t aim at.

Another word writers of Scripture used meant broken, like a broken chair or a broken computer that’s not useful anymore. Sin does that to people.

There was a popular Netflix series a number of years ago called Breaking Bad. That was about sin.

We don’t use the word sin too much, so I don’t think sin was part of the series much, but Breaking Bad is just a less churchy sounding name for what sin is and what sin does.

Another word they would use for sin is a blemish like a blemished animal that was no longer fit to be offered to God.

One of the laws of adolescence is the more excited you are about a date the bigger the pimple you will get on that day. And I know that one from personal experience.

Some 200 times, the writers of Scripture use a word that means crooked or bent or twisted or distorted or not level.

We think about our nation today as the transition of power happens in the presidency.

We had a former president who resigned in disgrace and famously said, “I am not a crook.”

The writers of Scripture say there is crookedness in all of us.

Another word for sin is rebellion.

It involves this defiance against God and against moral order — like a little 4-year-old girl whose mother told her, “You can ride your bike as far down the sidewalk as this driveway and as far down as that driveway, but no further. If you ride further, I will spank you.”

True story. That strong-willed 4-year-old stuck out her butt and said, “Well, you’d better spank me now because I have places to go!”

That’s the human heart.

Many dozens of times sin is referred to as owing a debt because sinning against God or against another person always comes at a price. Forgiving someone always costs something.

Sometimes sin is pictured as swerving or going astray like someone who is too drunk to walk or, in our day, too drunk to drive safely, and they’re going to hurt someone.

Sometimes sin is called lawlessness, because to engage in it I have to rationalize to myself, at least for that moment — ethical principles, laws, and right and wrong don’t apply to me. “Not me!”

Related to that is the notion of sin as trespass, because we’re violating boundaries. I’m going where I ought not go, and at the same time my mind is justifying why it’s okay for me to go where it is that at some level I know I ought not go.

I can always find some reason. Especially someone in my profession.

A minister parked his car in a no-parking zone in a large city because he was late for an appointment.

He couldn’t find a space with a meter, so he wrote a note and left it under the windshield wiper that read, “I have circled the block 10 times. If I don’t park here, I’ll miss my appointment. Forgive us our trespasses.”

When he returned, he found a ticket from a police officer along with this note. “I have circled this block for 10 years. If I don’t give you a ticket, I will lose my job. Lead us not into temptation.”

One of the most important words for sin is the word impurity.

James says:

Purify your heart. (James 4:8)

Paul writes to Timothy:

Do not share in the sins of others. Keep yourself pure. (1 Timothy 5:22)

Maybe most famously, Jesus says:

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. (Matthew 5:8)

I know, that word purity can sound quite old-fashioned or even oppressive in our day, and it has been and sometimes is used by churches in weird ways, culturally strange ways, or ways that are oppressive, particularly for women, so I want to spend a moment on it.

The notion of purity at its core means there is a way things are supposed to be when they’re right and whole and wholesome and good.

Just at the physical level, we have standards.

There’s a Food and Drug Administration, and it has standards of purity that are not to be violated.

If you ever read FDA standards, they’re actually a little concerning because of how much impurity they allow in our food.

I’ll read you a couple that kind of disturbed me.

If you ever eat apple butter — this is the FDA.

If it averages four or more rodent hairs per 100 grams, or if it averages five or more insects, not counting mice or aphids, which are apparently okay with the government, the FDA will pull it.

Otherwise, it just goes right on your bagel with three or less rodent hairs on it.

Mushrooms cannot be sold only if there is an average of 20 or more maggots of any size per 15 grams.

Nineteen maggots? That’s okay.

This is the government. This is your government.

If there are more than 13 insect heads per 100 grams of fig paste, the FDA will toss it out. More than 13… If there are 12 or less…

Apparently, other insect body parts are okay. We just don’t want to have to look at their little heads when we’re having fig paste.

Hot dogs? You don’t want to know.

If they took all of the impurities out of a hot dog, there would be nothing left at all.

The language of purity reminds us of something we all know — that there is a way things are supposed to be, and that’s true of fig paste, and it’s true of the human character (love and justice).

And sin is simply the destruction of that.

It means we end up polluting the physical world, and our own characters, and our own souls, and the moral world around us, because we live in a moral and spiritual ecosystem just as we do a physical ecosystem, and we all affect it, and we’re all affected by it.

Sin enslaves and degrades. It deadens and depresses. This is a really important thing for us to be aware of.

Sometimes even around churches people are kind of concerned about getting punished for sin, and the main message might be, “Here’s how you keep from being punished from sin,” but actually the freedom we need most is freedom from the power of sin.

Churches get a little weird about that.

Sometimes people around churches can wonder things like, “How much sin can there be in my life before I need to start worrying? Is there a level of sin in the acceptable zone for a Christian and, if you go higher, you’re in danger, like the level of plastic in the ocean? Is there a limit to impurity? Is it high or is it low?”

It’s a little bit like asking, “How much cancer should I let build up in my body before I ought to do something about it?”

The problem with sin is not just simply that we’re going to get in trouble for it someday; it is its own punishment at its core.

Now, what sin should I hate?

Sometimes people defend the saying, “Love the sinner; hate the sin,” from a verse in Romans where Paul says these amazing words:

Love must be sincere (You can work on that one your whole life.) Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. (Romans 12:9)

Notice Paul is not saying we’re supposed to hate the sin in someone else’s life (those people out there).

He’s saying, “I should hate my sin, my coldness, my greed, my self-centeredness, and anything that would keep me from loving sincerely.”

I want to take a moment right now to call us all to do this today.

I just want to talk as your pastor about sin for a moment, because I’ve watched too many marriages end up in coldness and resentment and pain and death where little lives get shattered, and it could have been otherwise.

I’ve seen too many young people and, honestly not so young people, who live in a hyper-sexualized culture make really bad decisions, and someone’s heart gets shattered or someone’s body makes a promise that their will won’t keep.

I’ve seen family members grow cold and distant and go for days or weeks or years in silence and cruelty for reasons so stupid they can’t even remember.

This is Martin Luther King Jr weekend. — We’ve all seen a nation torn apart by racial injustice when words and deeds of repentance and contrition and humility might have honored God and healed wounds but did not come.

I’ve watched parents idolize work at the expense of little children.

I’ve watched people get so consumed with more and more and more that they forget in a world there are thousands of little children who die of hunger every day, and I could be a part of the solution. I could save some.

I’ve seen women demeaned by men who cover it up in soul-destroying ways.

I’ve seen lives destroyed.

In what could have been a wonderful friendship, they heard words of gossip that tear down a reputation like that.

I’ve seen workplaces (you all have) where fear or power or intimidation turned the people who worked there into shadows of who they might have been.

I’ve seen what pride and ego and deceptiveness can do to my heart, so I just simply want to ask every one of us today — this is part of what it means to be a church — to surrender your will and your life wholly to God.

You need to do this.

Ask God to convict you of any sin. When was the last time you’ve done that?

Just in a few moments of quiet, ask God, “Would you prompt my conscience? Any attitude, any habit, any words, or any deeds I’ve done where sin has a foothold on me, God, I want to confess it.”

If you’ve wronged someone, go to that person and confess it.
If you’ve done something wrong, make it right as best you can.
If you need accountability, get it.

You see, the relief of forgiveness, and a new start, and a cleansed conscience, and a God-honoring life, and freedom are only one honest prayer away from getting started, so don’t neglect this.

That’s the problem (the power of sin) and how God wants to free us from it.

Then there’s the first part of this saying — “Love the sinner.”

Now, this seems like the kind of thing Jesus would say. Jesus loved everyone.

He was called the friend of sinners. That was intended as an insult, by the way; he wore it like a badge of honor.

He got in trouble for this all of the time. It’s more or less what got him killed. He hung out with sinners. He came to help sinners.

Paul wrote:

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. (1 Timothy 1:15)

He was like a sinner magnet.

Yet, Jesus never says, “Love the sinner.”

He says, “Love your neighbor,” and he says, “Love your enemy,” and he says, “Love one another,” but he never actually says the words, “Love sinners.”

Why not?

Well, of course, for one thing, just saying, “Love your neighbor,” covers everyone.

Your neighbor is not just the person next door. It’s whoever you run into, so sinners are already included.

But I have a feeling part of the reason Jesus never said this is because, if Jesus would have said, “Love the sinner,” his followers would have started looking for sinners and would have started dividing the world up into, “Sinners.”

And then, “What should we call the other category? Good, right-thinking people of the correct ideology, or party, or religion, or sexuality, or values? People like me.”

Then, we get all puffed up about it and say, “Hey! Come look at me loving these sinners.”

It’s so interesting that Jesus hangs out with sinners all of the time, but he never says, “I love you, but I hate your sin.”

Instead, he talks with them a lot about God’s mercy, God’s grace, God’s acceptance, and God’s forgiveness. — “I love you. Why don’t you come get a fresh start?”

In fact, about the only times in the Gospels… you can check this out… where Jesus expresses hatred for sin is the sin of loveless, judgmental spirits when he’s hanging out with people who have regarded themselves as spiritual experts and spiritually mature people.

In one of his most famous stories he tells us about this. He says:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: (Luke 18:9)

In other words, they were guilty of the great sin of not loving, but they didn’t think of themselves as sinners. They thought those were the sinners.

Jesus told this parable about a proud, religious Pharisee (a spiritual expert) who loudly thanks God, “God, I thank you that I’m not like that corrupt tax collector over there,” and the corrupt tax collector is quietly praying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

By the way, that’s the origin of the Jesus Prayer.

That’s where it starts 2,000 years ago in that story. It’s that sinful tax collector to the shock of the crowd in his brokenness and neediness and humiliation who is the hero.

We have no business pronouncing judgment on other people because we don’t know anyone’s full story.

C.S. Lewis put it like this in a little bit of a lengthy passage, but it’s so helpful it’s worth reading.

“Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.

“When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God’s eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning [a Purple Heart].

“When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

“It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. […]

“That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. […] There will be surprises.”

Lewis says that when the final judgment comes, there will be surprises.

As you hear these words, if you’re a dog person and you were wondering if there is ever a good reason for picking up a cat, well now you know.

You know the difference between cats and dogs, right?

A dog looks at you and says, “You feed me, clean up after me, take care of me — you must be God.”

A cat looks at you and says, “You feed me, clean up after me, take care of me — I must be God.”

Well Jesus says, “Judge not,” because religious people have a hard time not judging. It’s a weird thing about us.

I give up bad habits (drinking, smoking, swearing, watching porn) or I start good habits (praying, reading the Bible, exercising, giving, volunteering). Those are good things to do.

This is the way the Evil One works.

Very often my next thought is, “What’s the matter with other people? What’s the matter with you? Why can’t you be more like me? Why can’t you do what I do?”

A little root of hypocritical, judgmental lovelessness springs up in the middle of all of that glittering virtue.

I think I’m doing good at this and good at this, and ironically, it chokes out love, and love is the first commandment.

This is sometimes why people who pursue all of that virtue can end up worse off than if they never would at all.

It’s interesting. In our day, Christians will often lament the lack of Christian influence in politics and society and culture and the loss of belief in moral absolutes and theological orthodoxy, but the Pharisees were very committed to moral absolutes and theological orthodoxy, and they were not bringing in paradise.

An awful lot of leaders in the Middle Ages who had a lot of power were very committed to moral absolutes and theological orthodoxy, and it didn’t usher in paradise.

In Geneva in John Calvin’s day — Philip Yancey writes about this — church attendance was compulsory. It was the law. If you didn’t go to church on Sunday, you’d be arrested in Geneva.

Here are things that were forbidden: feasting, dancing, singing, pictures, statues, church bells, organs, wearing rouge or jewelry or lace, gambling, playing cards, or naming children after anyone but figures in the Bible.

Those things were all against the law. Don’t you wish you lived in Geneva?

A father who christened his son Claude, which is a name not found in the Bible, spent four days in jail.

As did a woman — I’m not making this up — whose hairdo reached an immoral height. Apparently, there is a certain height hair can go to where it’s moral, and beyond that it was judged to be immoral.

Women in the 80s would be in trouble.

A child who struck his parents was beheaded in Geneva.

John Calvin’s stepson and daughter-in-law were caught in sexual misconduct and both beheaded.

When the church turns into the moral’s police — “We have the power now. We’ll pass the laws now.” It generally doesn’t help too much.

The world does not need more Christians pointing out what people are doing wrong.

At the end of Jesus’ story about the Pharisee and the tax collector, Jesus says:

For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Luke 18:14)

It’s just weird. The very fact I believe there is such a thing as sin and we ought to strive against it can create this idea or this illusion that I’m better than those secularists out there or those relativists out there or those non-believers out there who don’t even believe in the word sin.

There’s a really interesting line in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird. At the heart of it, the writer says her dad told her something about right and wrong that she never forgot.

Her dad was Atticus Finch who’s the hero of this wonderful book. She writes that her dad said to her:

“Remember, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird, an innocent little creature that just wants to bring beauty into the world.”

In many ways, the whole book kind of flows out of that one moral teaching. Then, she says:

“That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something.”

Why was that the only time he uses the word sin? He’s a really upright character.

If you’ve ever read that book, he’s one of the great moral heroes in all of literature. There is a lot of sin and lots of wrong in the world. He fights against it with great moral courage.

I think maybe that’s the only time he used the word because it’s so hard to raise children who are righteous without making them self-righteous.

It’s easy — so terribly easy — for those of us who use the word sin to take pride in our right beliefs (all of the wrong things I’ve never done).

It’s easy — so terribly easy — for people like me to see sin out there and miss sin in here and damage people and end up not loving and not even knowing that I’m not loving.

So let’s not do that.

It is so easy to miss grace. Let’s not miss grace.

Let’s humble ourselves. Let’s love.

There are massive amounts of sin. How much sin is there in the Bay Area? Oh, my goodness! Tons of sin! It’s a Sinapalooza out there.

San Jose? Are you kidding me?

Oakland? Oh, my goodness!

San Francisco? Arrogance, greed, misuse of power, envy, promiscuity, hedonism, godlessness… Wow!

How much sin is here in this church? Oh, my goodness! Wow! It’s a Sinapalooza around here. I know! I get data on this on a regular basis because of my job.

How much sin is there in my heart? Wow!

Only God knows fully. I don’t even know fully. But what I know is scary. I know this much — there is at least enough sin in here to keep Jesus busy for the next several decades if he had nothing else to do.

So let’s love.

Let’s hate the sin that is in us because it keeps us from being the people God wants us to be and messes up our world so badly.

Then, let’s be the world’s leading experts, not at pointing out the sins of the world out there, not even at being able to demonstrate the validity of the concept of sin, but let’s be the world’s leading experts at bringing our own sin to God and laying it at the cross.

Let’s ask for his help.
Let’s ask for freedom from the power of sin in our lives.
Let’s humble ourselves.

Will you pray with me?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.