Respectable Sins | Episode: How Much Can A Christian Sin?

Theocast

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

that if we have the Holy Spirit, how is it that someone who has the Spirit can perform such horrible acts of sin, and then not only that, but repetitive acts?

00:12

Let me put this out there for someone who's listening and maybe even struggling and judging us at the moment.

00:21

What's interesting to me is that someone who's very quick, and there are several camps out there that are very quick to judge people who basically don't overcome sin quickly.

00:34

Let me point out your acceptable sins, the sins that it doesn't bother you that you sin repetitively over and over and over again.

00:46

These are the acceptable sins, the sins of judgmentalism, the sins of laziness, the sins of lack of faith would be one, or the sin of gossip.

00:59

Can I keep going? These are the sins that we— I'll throw one in. Yeah, come on, jump on in.

01:06

We're excited to announce that we have a new free e -book available at our website called Faith vs.

01:13

Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

01:30

You can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

01:38

You can do that by joining our Total Access membership. That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

01:49

You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

01:58

We've commented on this before. I've said something about this before, I think in the members area, and I'm going to go ahead and say it now for all to hear.

02:06

One of the respectable sins that everybody commits, that everybody is pretty happy to admit they struggle with, is pride.

02:14

If you ask somebody, hey, tell me what you're struggling with, to a man, almost every person is going to say, well, pride.

02:23

It's very interesting to me that in the circles that you're pointing out, where we're very quick to tell somebody, like the guy that says,

02:32

I've been struggling in a battle against sexual sin, like in the form of pornography, for 15 years.

02:42

Well, the response of most people in that scenario is going to be, you've been battling against pornography for 15 years, and you don't have victory over that yet.

02:52

Are you sure that you're even a Christian? Because if you had the Holy Spirit in you, you would see victory over pornography by this point, 15 years in.

03:01

Okay. I would want to turn the table on that. Man or woman. I mean, here's the thing. The reality is that's not gender anymore.

03:08

No, no, no, I agree. I was just illustrating, you know, it could easily be a female, not a male.

03:15

I would turn the tables right then in that moment, the person that is saying, how do you know you're a

03:21

Christian if you're still struggling with porn after 15 years? I would say, well, okay, how long have you been a believer? Let's just say

03:27

I've been a believer for 20 years. And you told me just a minute ago that you still struggle with pride.

03:33

Well, yeah, I do. Okay, well, you've been a Christian for 20 years and you don't have victory over pride yet, are you sure that you're even a believer?

03:43

And if you're in ministry, it gets even worse. Like if you're a pastor and you're like, yeah, I've been in the ministry for 30 years and I'm still struggling with pride, my response there is, okay, you've been battling pride for 30 years and you're not victorious over it yet.

03:56

Maybe you should question your salvation. Two, you're in the ministry, maybe you should resign because God says that humility is a prerequisite.

04:06

I mean, like for real, if we want to really nail this stuff to the wall, that's how we would talk. And of course we don't talk that way about respectable sins.

04:16

You know, Jerry Bridges talks about respectable sins. We don't talk that way about respectable sins, but the heinous ones, of course we do, the sexual sins and stuff that's very demonstrable in public and nature.

04:27

Like, well, you should be looking differently than you are if you're going to still continue to claim

04:32

Jesus. All the while battling pride, gossip, malicious talk, all those things. Go Jon.