What is the worst sin? What are the consequences of sin? What is a sin of omission? - Podcast Ep 182

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Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. Today, Jeff and Kevin are joining me again to discuss some of our most frequently asked questions about sin.

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So if you didn't watch the first episode in this series, we invite you to do so, because a lot of what we're covering today is covered in that.

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And also the last episode where we did six other frequently asked questions. We should find that helpful as well.

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So Jeff, Kevin, thank you for joining me today. And the first question we're gonna cover is what is the greatest or worst sin?

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Now, I'll tackle this one. I think it's interesting in that two words that are basically opposites, greatest and worst, but the way the questions are typically asked, it's the same question.

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We're asking what is like the worst? What is the biggest sin? And people will sometimes put, they'll guess it's something's worse than those.

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Some people think that something like pedophilia is the worst sin or is murder the worst sin.

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They try to figure out as if there's, I wanna avoid the worst sin, don't really care about the little ones.

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Well, that's not a biblical way of looking at sin to begin with in that the Bible makes it very clear that every sin is an offense against God and every sin results in us being separated from God.

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Every sin requires faith in the death of Christ on the cross and his resurrection for forgiveness of that sin.

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So there's no, like you just avoid the big sins or the worst sins, you're good.

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No, every sin requires forgiveness. And the Bible nowhere identifies a worst sin specifically.

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And we got another episode we did on what is the unpardonable sin. So if there is one hard -hearted, continued rebellion, rejection of Christ despite clear evidence that he is who he says he is, that would be the closest thing the biblical text comes to defining a worst sin.

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But again, what most people ask this question, they're just looking for big ones to avoid.

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There's the seven deadly sins, which we covered in the previous episode where not a specifically biblical list, but sins to avoid.

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There's in Proverbs, the seven sins that the Lord hates, or seven things the Lord hates. So there's different lists, there's different sins that are identified as being particularly heinous, particularly evil.

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And even the ones I mentioned, I'd say pedophilia is one of the most loathsome sins

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I could possibly think of, but the Bible nowhere identifies it as the worst sin.

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So if you're going strictly by the Bible, the worst sin would be knowing who Jesus is, having clear evidence of who he is, yet continuing in hard -hearted rebellion to reject that knowledge, that wisdom that God has given you into Jesus is continuing to reject him, is the, in that sense, the unforgivable sin, the one sin that God can't forgive, because if you reject

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Jesus' death and resurrection for your sins, there's nothing else for you.

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There's no means of forgiveness, there's no path to God if you reject that. So if there's a worst sin, biblically speaking, it is the sin of rejecting

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Jesus Christ as your Savior. So question number two, and Jeff, how do you tackle this one?

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What are the consequences of sin? Or like what happens when you sin?

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Consequences is actually a good word to use because it just literally means what comes after.

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You know, what comes after sin? What is the consequence of sin? And sometimes we get a little simplistic and we just think of it as punishment and nothing else, that it is just God deciding if or when

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I see somebody do this, I am going to snap my fingers and make certain things happen. And there's an element of that, but there's more than one thing that comes after sin or when we sin.

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Sin is eternal separation from God. So that's the biggest and the worst consequence of sin is that it separates us from him and his perfection.

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And that's the whole reason that we need salvation, we need a Savior. It also involves earthly separation from God.

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And this is the relational side, where if we sin, then we are separating ourselves in our spirit, in our life, in our personality from who

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God is and what he is. And that causes us issues, makes us struggle with things, it interferes with our purpose.

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Then there's also earthly consequences. And that's everything from just natural results through legal consequences and things like that.

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So when you sin, you are looking at a whole range of different negative consequences.

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They're physical, psychological, social, economic. One way to think of this would be something like the user's manual for a tool or an equipment, some piece of machinery.

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And sometimes you'll have instructions there that will say, do not do this, do not use it this way, do not do that.

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Well, the reason is because if you don't follow those instructions, there's going to be consequences.

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The machine wears down more quickly, you get inferior results. Sometimes it can be dangerous.

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We can see parallels to that in medical advice. So the consequences of not following certain instructions or not carefully taking medication or not doing what the doctor says we're supposed to do or not do comes with consequences.

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And those are very natural. There's the example that we've talked about before of things like printed warnings.

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Do not go beyond this point, warning, fall hazard. I think I saw a sign somewhere that said something about falling cows.

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I don't understand what that means, but the sign says, be careful for it. If you're going to wander in that area, better have a really good umbrella.

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Those are consequences that just come from what we're doing. A lot of those are not necessarily about somebody standing there.

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So the person who wrote the user's manual isn't waiting with a baseball bat or a ruler or something like that for you to not do what's in that and then punish you by taking some sort of active step.

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They're warning by saying, look, this is what happens when you do this. And that comes down to sometimes just quality of life in your user's manual for your vehicle.

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It will tell you things about the proper way to maintain it and things to be careful of when you're driving it.

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Well, if you're gonna drive the car really hard and not maintain it, it's not gonna work as well.

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It's not gonna function according to its intended design and its intended purpose.

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So when we look at consequences of sin, we're really talking about this whole range of different things.

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First of all, yes, we're disobeying and disobedient to God. That creates separation.

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Yes, that then puts us in a position where he has the right and sometimes the obligation to actively do something to correct us, to punish us.

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But most of the consequences of sin really just come from God saying, this is not how I designed you to be.

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This is the way that the world is put together. And if you do these things, if you violate these rules, these are the natural consequences that are going to happen.

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You're going to experience all of these different things that are gonna happen. So consequences for sin is a really good way to think of it because it's exactly what it is.

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It's just what comes after, what happens when we sin. And there's a lot of different things that can happen with we sin.

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And a lot of them are not God's deliberate, immediate, purposeful action.

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Sometimes those things are just exactly what you would expect to happen by natural consequences.

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So Jeff, let me hit you with a follow up on this. And a question I just saw come in just the other day.

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Yeah. If Jesus' death on the cross, as Christians we've trusted in him for the forgiveness of our sins.

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And so we know that we're delivered from that consequence. We're delivered from the eternal separation from God aspect of sin.

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Why would you say God doesn't always deliver us from the human, the natural, the everyday life consequences of sin?

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Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. What would some of the reasoning you would think that God doesn't always, or maybe to say it in a different way,

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God sometimes allows us to face the earthly, physical, whatever consequences of our sinful choices?

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I think one of the reasons that God doesn't always interfere to remove every consequence of sin in our life.

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And along with the question that you're asking, it's also important to bring up that some of the consequences of sin are consequences of other people's sin.

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Tremendous amount of suffering that happens in the world isn't because of what that person did. It's because of somebody else's choice to sin.

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But I think one of the reasons that God does that is because he has designed the world in a certain way.

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He has created a certain set of rules and order. We refer to those things by what we define as science mathematics.

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That's how we understand those things and the way he set up the world. If God was going to completely remove all of the earthly penalties for all of my sin and all of my imperfection and all of my failures, that would mean him constantly, perpetually interfering in something that he designed for a reason.

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And that would prevent me from doing things like learning. And that sounds like a sort of a callous or harsh way to put it, but there would be no purpose behind things like discipleship or learning or development.

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I would just sort of walk around in this supernatural bubble bouncing off all the bad things.

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And it would in a sense make the love and the obedience that we're supposed to be called to sort of pointless.

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So when God calls us, he doesn't call us out of the world. He calls us to be what he wants us to be in the world.

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So primarily it's because he doesn't choose to remove us from everything that we're in. We're still in a natural world of cause and effect and those consequences.

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And for the most part, the things that we're going to experience are gonna be about the same. Well said,

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Jeff. That's a real struggle for some people who they'll see, they've gotten away with the sin multiple times and now suddenly they're facing the consequences or they're facing the consequences of it and they see other people getting away with it.

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So it's another trusting God, be thankful for the times where he delivers you from the consequences and view the times that he doesn't as learning experiences as in Hebrew talks about the loving yet firm discipline of God.

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To that, I would also bring up sort of an anecdote that I've heard before, where there was a farmer who was being encouraged to attend church, even though he didn't like it.

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And one year he decided to just completely stop and he didn't go to church at all for the entire year.

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And he came to the preacher, when the preacher came to his house and said, hey, I haven't seen you at church for all what's going on.

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The farmer said, hey, I want you to know since I stopped going to church, I have had the best crops

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I have ever had this year. And the preacher just shrugged his shoulders. He said, well, that's great, but God doesn't close his accounts in November.

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So it's good to keep in mind that the earthly consequences are just one little slice of what happens when we sin.

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Let's go ahead and jump into, yeah, go ahead, Kevin. Jeff, as you were talking about owner's manuals and things like that,

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I kept thinking of, when all else fails, read the instructions. Isn't that like our attitude so many times when it comes to walking in righteousness versus walking in sin, and we disobey

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God, we start wondering why things are going haywire. And well, did we read the instructions? Did we go back and take a look at what scripture actually says?

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A lot of guidance right there. I've got another question here that I'll continue here with our little series.

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What is the biblical definition of idolatry? So I guess first we can start with like a dictionary definition.

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Webster's says that idolatry is the worship of idols, of course, or excessive devotion to or reverence for some person or a thing.

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And so a definition could be very broad as we give excessive devotion to or reverence for anything here in this world.

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And we've got the show that's on TV, American Idol, we actually use that word.

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And sometimes entertainers and, you know, entertainers and superstars kind of reach that level where people are giving them an excessive amount of devotion or reverence.

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But idolatry is something that humanity has struggled with all along. The very first commandment that God gave, the first of the 10 commandments,

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I should say, is you shall have no other gods before me. You should not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven or on earth or waters below, shall not bow down to them or worship them,

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Exodus 20 verses three through five. So any created thing that's given undue attention, any created thing that we fashion an image of and say, you know, this is

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God, this is what we're worshiping or this represents God, and this is what we're going to worship. This is a sin that is specifically forbidden in the 10 commandments.

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And Israel had a perennial problem with the Baals and the Asherahs. We see that phrase used often in the

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Old Testament. The Baals and the Asherahs that the ancient Hebrews were following after in direct violation to the commands of God.

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We also see idolatry mentioned in the New Testament. In Romans chapter one, Paul goes through the kind of the fall of man and how we have this progression of depravity as we go from stage to stage.

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And part of this, he says that people claimed to be wise, but they became fools, their foolish heart was darkened, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal

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God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

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And this was part of the problem. This is part of the depravity of man that we would have a certain knowledge of God, but then we would give that up.

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We would exchange that for just stuff that we made with our own hands. And that's what we start focusing on.

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That's what we start worshiping. That's where our devotion and adoration goes. And this is all part of the sin nature.

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So we have Aaron at Mount Sinai in Exodus chapter 32, who takes what's handed to him, the gold ear rings and all of that, the people were giving him, and he fashioned it with a tool into an idol in the shape of a calf.

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And then they said, these are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.

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And this is amazing. This cow, this image of a cow is what brought us out of Egypt.

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This is what split the Red Sea for us. This is the being that defeated the

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Egyptian army and gave us liberty. This cow, are you serious? Well, they were very serious about it.

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And Aaron, in fact, in the next verse, and Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf, and he announced, tomorrow there will be a festival to the

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Lord, capital L -O -R -D. This is Aaron saying, we are going to worship

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Yahweh. And this sacred cow is a representation of Yahweh, the covenant

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God that saved us out of slavery in Egypt. And God says, no, no, no.

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I cannot be represented by anything here in this world. In fact,

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I will not. I refuse to be represented by anything here in this world.

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And Aaron and the people paid a price for this idolatry right there at Mount Sinai.

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A .W. Tozer wrote this, the essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.

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That's what Aaron was doing at Mount Sinai, and he made that golden calf. He was entertaining thoughts about God that were unworthy of Him.

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God's not a cow made of gold or otherwise, but there's actually more to it than that.

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There's more to idolatry than just bowing down to a graven image. And Colossians 3 and verse 5 tells us this, put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature, sexual immorality, impurity, lost, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry.

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Very interesting that idolatry here is a matter of the heart. Specifically, idolatry is a matter of greed in the heart.

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So greed is excessive devotion to or reverence of stuff or status.

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And Jesus warned us about this in Luke 12 and verse 15. Jesus says, watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed.

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A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. So all kinds of greed, that means there's all kinds of idolatry, different types of it.

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And this is such a hard thing for us to grasp usually, that our life does not consist in the abundance of our possessions.

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Because I can say, you know, I've got a lot of stuff. I've got a lot of valuable stuff. I've got a lot of very desirable stuff.

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And so that makes me something, right? Jesus says, no, it's not your life. That you're using the wrong measuring stick to measure your value.

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The New Living Translation puts it like this, life is not measured by how much you own.

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That's not where our life consists. So Jesus says that the materialistic mindset is greed.

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Paul says that greed equals idolatry. And so materialism equals idolatry.

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So I think, yes, we struggle with idolatry still here in this world. In our culture today, we struggle with materialism.

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We struggle with reverence of things that we make, things that are desirable in our eyes, stuff and status.

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And so we still struggle with idolatry today. Kevin, that's an excellent point.

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Some people think of idolatry as a sin that was in the past. Like, oh, we don't struggle with that today. So one that's important to remember that in many countries in the world today,

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I'll give you India, for example, and some Catholic countries where images of saints and Mary and so forth are just everywhere, literal idolatry and sort of bowing down to idols is still very common.

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But even in countries where it's not, we still struggle with idolatry. Because as you said, it's ultimately a matter of the heart.

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Thank you for that powerful reminder there. It's something we all struggle with just in various forms.

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So jumping to the next question, I'll tackle this one. What is a sin of omission?

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It's pretty obvious to most what a sin of commission is. It's something that we actively do.

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So what's a sin of omission? Well, in James 4 .17, it says, "'Anyone then who knows the good he ought to do "'and doesn't do it, sins.'"

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So not only is sin something, a violation of the law, a violation of a commandment or a trespass, a transgression, something we actively do, sin is also seeing something good that we should do and not doing it.

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That's a whole nother level. It's one thing I can avoid committing certain sins.

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Even in my own strength, I can hold myself back from committing certain sins.

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But when you view sin as basically not doing the good that you should, not doing something that God's calling you to, that's a whole nother level.

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And I think Paul in Romans 7 addresses some of this struggle in verses 14 to 20.

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So this is Romans 7, 14 to 20. "'For we know that the law is spiritual, "'but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.

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"'For I do not understand my own actions. "'For I do not do what I want, "'but I do the very thing

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I hate. "'Now if I do what I do not want, "'I agree that the law is good. "'So now it is no longer

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I who do it, "'but sin that dwells in me. "'For I know that nothing good dwells in me "'that is in my flesh. "'For

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I have the desire to do what is right, "'but not the ability to carry it out. "'For I do not do the good

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I want, "'but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. "'Now if I do what

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I do not want, "'it is no longer I who do it, "'but sin who dwells in me.'" So here Paul's discussing this struggle.

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Not only, he's failing on both ends. The evil he doesn't wanna do, he ends up doing.

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The good that he does wanna do, he doesn't end up doing. So he's recognizing, I'm committing both sins of commission and sins of omission.

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The sins of omission are harder to identify. I remember one time just personally struggling with this verse in terms of just,

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I was walking through a park and I saw a bunch of litter sitting around. It's like, is it a good thing to pick up litter?

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Well, yes, but I know God doesn't want me spending my entire day trying to clean up this entire park of all the litter that's sitting around.

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So it's like, how do you know? So it's important when you think of the good that you ought to do or the good that God's calling you, you look to God's word for those things.

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When you see someone who's hurting, God wants us to show love. When you see someone with a need, God wants us to meet that need.

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James 2 is a powerful example of that. So it's not just everyday good that God's talking about, because constant opportunities to do things.

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It's just things that God's word specifically calls us to. When we see an opportunity to do those things and we do not, that's when a sin of omission has been committed.

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So Christian life is a war against the world, the flesh and the devil.

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And all three of those are trying to conspire against us to one, get us to commit sins of commission, doing the things that we shouldn't, but also to not do the things that we should, which is a sin of omission.

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Something that we all struggle with to varying degrees. So jumping to the next question, and Jeff, I think this one's for you.

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What does the Bible say about addiction and specifically how do sin and addiction relate to one another?

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Well, it's a good connection to what you were just talking about with sins of omission and commission, in a sense that sin of omission actually ties pretty closely into addiction and what that means.

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And this is a controversial aspect for a lot of people because the typical definition of addiction involves people doing things that are harmful, sinful.

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And that raises the question of, is it a sin to be addicted? Is it a sin to be an addict?

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Is addiction a sin in and of itself? And it's a little more complicated than that because we talk about consequences of sin and the things

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I do on earth can sometimes have consequences that I can fix. So if I'm working in my workshop and I accidentally cut my finger a little bit with a razor blade or something like that, that's a fixable thing.

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There are steps I can take and I can restore that cut on my finger back to perfect condition to the point that you'd never even know that it had happened.

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If I wound myself a little bit worse than that, I might be able to fix it to where it doesn't impede my function anymore, but you can always see a scar that's there that lets me know what happened.

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If I accidentally cut off a body part with a saw, then at least as far as modern technology is concerned, that's not a recoverable wound.

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Now, I will from that point forward in my life, always and forever, suffer the consequences of what

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I have done. But the stupid thing that I did, the lapse in attention or the whatever, was a momentary issue.

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I am not therefore being consistently and constantly stupid, foolish, careless for the rest of my life.

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What I'm suffering is the consequences of that. And addiction sort of falls into the same category.

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We talked previously about the idea of a seared conscience where you can become numb to the voice of the

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Holy Spirit. And in a sense, you could think of addiction as having a maimed conscience.

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So you have put yourself in a position where something has happened to your spirit, your body, your soul that has now created something that's essentially beyond your capability to fix or to do anything about.

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It is not true in the strictest sense that addicts have no control over what they do, but it is close to that.

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True addiction is something that comes at such a fundamental level that the person is now given over to the control of that.

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And that's why Paul talks about the idea of, there's lots of good things in the world, but I'm not gonna be mastered by anything.

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1 Corinthians 6, 12. When a person is addicted, that person is essentially powerless.

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They have ceded over control of themselves to something. Doesn't mean they did it on purpose.

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In fact, I can't think of anybody who deliberately sets out to say, I think I'd like to become a slave to this drug or to this habit or to this thing.

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So in an important sense, being addicted is not a sin any more than expecting a child out of wedlock.

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That status is not a sin, but one does not get to that point without sin.

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You don't become an addict without somebody's sin being involved in there.

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So addiction is caused by sin. Being addicted is not a sin per se.

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However, we talk about sins of omission and commission. If I maim myself in my office and that severely prevents me from doing the job that I need to do to take care of my family,

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I do have some choices. I can say, okay, I can recognize that I've now damaged myself and I need to take the proper steps to be able to overcome that.

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I can seek medical care. I can seek a prosthesis. I can change the way that I do different things.

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If I choose to say, well, there's nothing I can do about it. I cut my hand off with a saw and I can't do anything now except just sit and do nothing.

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So I lost my right hand. I was right -handed, so I can never write again. I can never drive again. I can't cook.

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I can't do anything. Now we're starting to lean into sins of omission. And where I think addiction becomes most dangerous is when people understand that addiction is no longer a choice, that it is something that they're given over control to.

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But then we say, okay, well, because I'm addicted, there's nothing I can do. Well, there are things that can be done.

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Can we seek counseling? Can we seek care? Can we seek therapy? It's okay for a person to recognize and say, you know what?

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When I'm put in that circumstance, I simply lack the control or the willpower to make the right decision.

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So what right decision can I make now? And what can I do? God has the ability to get people out of addiction.

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He has the ability to pull people from those things. People are not going to be hopelessly lost in addiction forever if they're willing to rely on the power of Christ.

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But that does not come through sheer willpower. So if there is sin in ongoing addiction, that sin primarily comes through omission.

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It is when somebody does not choose to do what they can do in seeking

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God, in seeking help, in following his will in order to access the power that they have to overcome it.

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So sort of in a shorter version of that is becoming an addict always involves some sort of sin.

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Being an addict is not necessarily a sin in and of itself, but choosing to remain an addict passively is absolutely sinful.

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And I think we've got one more that we need to cover here. The last question here is, does the

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Bible teach generational sin? And so short answer, yes, it does indirectly teach generational sin, but we needed to define the term.

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Generational sin is a pattern of sinful behavior that is passed down from one generation to another.

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And those negative patterns of behavior bring with them negative consequences that are experienced from generation to generation.

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Three things I'd like to say about this. One is that children are like their parents. And my daughter has red hair.

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Well, you go back a little bit, her great -grandmother on my side had red hair.

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And so that red hair shows up sometimes, and we all expect that kind of a thing. We share physical characteristics from one generation to another.

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So somebody says you look like your dad, that's probably true physically, but it's also true spiritually, most likely.

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If my dad had an anger problem, then it's very likely that I'm also gonna be struggling with anger issues.

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If my mother was a worrywart and just constantly worried, then it's also very likely that I'm gonna be tempted to worry and to fret and to have anxiety issues.

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These sins are passed down many times from generation to generation.

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As we grow up in a home, we observe our parents' behavior, their actions and their reactions and their sins.

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And we absorb those and we end up repeating those and then we suffer the same consequences that the previous generations had suffered.

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And most basically, I think we can see generational sin in Romans 5 and verse 12 with Adam's sin.

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That verse says, "'Sin entered the world through one man and death through sin. And in this way, death came to all people because all sinned.'"

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So a couple of things are happening in that verse. This one is generational sin passed down from Adam.

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We die because of Adam's sin. That sin was passed down from generation to generation.

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But also happening in the same verse is the fact that we all sinned. We chose to follow the example of Adam.

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We picked up his sin and we carried it further.

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We chose to sin as well. Secondly, we all have choices that we can make.

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Ezekiel 18 and verse 20 says that, "'The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son.'"

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So very plainly in scripture, we are individuals who are responsible moral agents and we are responsible for our own choices.

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We all have decisions to make. So what happened in Joshua chapter seven with the sin of Achan?

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Achan stole stuff from Jericho. He took stuff he wasn't supposed to have and he dug a hole and hid it in the midst of his tent.

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But then when it comes time for, when he's eventually found out and it comes time for judgment, he is brought out along with his whole family and they are all stoned to death.

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So what's the deal with that? Well, the deal is that his family who were with him in the tent, they all knew about that hole in the ground.

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They all knew about that treasure that was stolen and they all covered it up.

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In becoming complicit with that sin, they brought their father's judgment upon themselves as well.

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They chose to be part of that sin. They didn't have to, but that's what they chose.

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The third thing I think needs to be said is that there's a natural tendency to repeat sin. Jeremiah 32, 18, you show love to thousands, speaking to God, you show love to thousands, but bring the punishment for the parents' sins into the laps of the children after them.

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We see the same sentiment in Deuteronomy 5 and verse 9. So why is this?

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Why is God visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children? Well, very simply because the children repeat the same sins and we have that tendency to always do that.

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When the Bible speaks of God punishing the children for the father's sin, it's simply another way of saying that the children are doing the same sins that the fathers had done.

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We are prone to repeat the mistakes of history and this is very true within family units.

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We repeat the sins of the fathers and we practice those same sinful lifestyles.

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That's the tendency at least. And the good news is that we can break the cycle.

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Galatians 5 and verse 16, so I say, walk in the Spirit and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.

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We have been redeemed out of the slavery of sin. Christ has given us liberty and as children of God filled with the

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Holy Spirit, we can choose to break the cycle of generational sin.

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We can start a new cycle of righteousness and walking in the Spirit and that is good news for us all.

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Well said, Kevin. And what I think is interesting in tying the last two ones together, a question for both of you.

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I hear a lot of people receive a lot of questions where the question is, is this generational sin, is it something that I'm doing because I observed it or is there like a tendency to a specific sin that's even passed down like on a spiritual or even like a genetic level?

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And addiction is one that I hear a lot in this category. It's like my father or grandfather or father and grandfather were both prone to say alcohol addiction.

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Am I more prone to it just because I'm their descendant, whether it's a genetic thing, whether it's a spiritual thing or am

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I more prone to it because I observed them doing it and that makes it more likely that I do it.

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So what do you two think is the biblical teaching on this and how can we have the right mindset about how exactly generational sins can be passed down?

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I think Kevin's point that he made about the idea that the core idea of generational sin is you are continuing to do the things your fathers did involves that idea of choice.

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And I think that there can be tendencies. I think that our spiritual weaknesses can be passed down in a sense, just like sometimes spiritual strengths can be just as much as physical things can be.

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But it doesn't make sense for me to say, look, I don't care if I've got this long family history of high blood pressure.

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I don't care if all the males on one side of the family died at 40 from massive heart attacks.

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I will eat what I want when I want and live how I want. That just doesn't make any sense.

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It's not necessarily my fault that I might have been born with a particular weakness or something that I am more prone to than other people.

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That's not my fault, but it is my responsibility. So I don't think God differentiates in that sense to where he's not going to say, you're right, this may be something that's more of a struggle for you than it is for other people, but that doesn't give us an excuse to say, well, that means it has nothing to do with me.

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Perhaps you are more inclined to that than others, but that just means that that's the path that you have to walk.

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Yeah, we're not gonna be fatalistic about it. Definitely, we are more prone to repeat those sins.

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Even in people, you see this sometimes, where people kind of brace themselves and say,

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I am not gonna be like my dad. I am not gonna be like my dad. And the next thing you know, they're being just like their dad.

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We have a certain tendency to repeat those sins. And I think there is a spiritual

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DNA that we are passed down from generation to generation, as well as the physical.

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We tend to just think of the physical, curly hair and curly hair, male pattern baldness or whatever is passed down.

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But there's also the spiritual aspect to life and we can't ignore that.

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That is a big part of it as well. Genesis five and verse three, Adam had a son in his own likeness, in his own image.

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I think that is more than just physical. I think that is a spiritual likeness and a spiritual image as well.

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And how much of it is genetic, how much of it is, when we start talking about addictions and things, the genetic versus the spiritual heredity,

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I don't know. I don't know where to draw that line, but like Jeff was just saying, we have the choice to take steps to, especially in the power of the

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Holy Spirit, to be preventing us from repeating those mistakes. Yeah, the core mistake that we typically make is we want to say, but this is just the way

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I am. And it doesn't matter whether that's something positive or negative, that's not the attitude that we're supposed to have.

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Who I am and what I am is supposed to be submitted to Christ. And if it's not the way that God intends it to be, then that's something that I'm supposed to submit to Him.

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I don't get to just say, well, this is just a thing and then ignore it, whether it's psychological or environmental or biological, it doesn't matter.

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God wants us to respond to Him the way we're supposed to. Well said, both of you.

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You brought out all the right points. And having done this ministry of answering people's questions for 21 years,

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I see echoes of different questions we've been asked and different tones, the way people ask the questions and stuff that's really on people's hearts and how they tend to blame shift or make excuses for why they are, when ultimately, according to the

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Bible, we all have the choice to, one, to avail ourselves of the forgiveness of sins that's available through faith in Jesus Christ, but we also have the responsibility to submit ourselves to the

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Holy Spirit and allow Him to empower us to overcome sin. And with that sort of the transition, the next episode in our questions about sin series is going to be how can a

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Christian achieve victory over sin? So please join us for the next episode for that. So Jeff, Kevin, thank you for joining me as always.

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Thank you for your excellent explanations in this sort of a second part of a miscellaneous frequently asked questions about sin.