Hi All
Something which makes me cringe internally is accepting or hearing us being called "sinner".
I find I am struggling with the term and its meanings applied to myself or good people I know. I feel like I am oppressing myself or committing a sin, odd as that might sound.
I am more inclined to see God's creation as divine and anything bad about it is due to malevolent forces on us and not our nature. I am just painting the background above so you understand why I ask these questions below:
My question is:
how do you deal with the negativity of being a sinner?
Or perhaps you don't feel it is negative, if not how can I arrive at that conclusion too?
.
I call myself a sinner and I say it quite willingly and boldly. Not as though I'm proud of it, I'm certainly not proud of my sin, but rather because I can confess it openly about myself.
I screw up, I make mistakes, I fail and miss the mark of what God would have me to regularly. That's what being a sinner means. Sin is "missing the mark": failing to do what we ought to do, and doing what we ought not do.
In seeing this in yourself you should feel sorrow for your sins. And it shouldn't feel good, we hurt one another. And we hurt one another all the time. That's not something to be glad about, but something to mourn. To realize that in myself there is this kernel of my humanity that rejoices in the pain of my neighbor, that when injured desires revenge, or when confronted with my mistakes or wrongs seeks to hide or shift blame on another. This isn't good, it's horrible. And that should, when we are finally confronted with it, force us to our knees and fill our eyes with tears of sorrow.
But that's not the end of it, that isn't the word God
wants to speak to us. The word God
wants to speak to us is the Gospel, that word He delivers from Mt. Calvary through the cross of the crucified Jesus that says, "Your sins are forgiven you, I love you, you are mine." He wants to pick up the broken wreckage of our humanity, collapsed under the weight of sin and death, and restore it, to lift it up and heal it. And that's what the cross and resurrection of Jesus is about, taking that which has been broken and repairing it.
So it's not simply, "I am a sinner", it's, "I am a sinner who in Christ has become the righteousness of God, in spite of myself." That God isn't going to sit back and let me rot in my own selfishness, but is going to make me that which He desires all of us to be in Him: the pure and perfect reflections of His righteousness and grace.
That's why Luther calls Christians
simul iustus et peccator, simultaneously saint and sinner. We are sinner-saints. In the crossfields of the old man filled with death, sin, and despair and the new man, perfect and righteous in Christ our God. At once finding ourselves somewhere between the old world, and the new world that is to come; and in this preachers of mercy and grace. Because real mercy requires real sin. To be a preacher of mercy means to know who and what we are, and who and what we hope to be. In this we can say, "I am a sinner" and also, "Here is the mercy that saves."
-CryptoLutheran
