The Beauty of the Awareness of Sin

Perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of religion has been turning the awareness of sin into a permanent accusation.

As if perceiving sin were perceiving only guilt, condemnation and failure.

But looking more deeply at the message of Jesus, everything begins to take on another meaning.

Jesus seems to shift the problem from behavior to the source of life.

“Without me you can do nothing.”

The human problem would not be only moral.
It would be disconnection.

Like Adam when he moved away from the tree of life.

That is why Jesus insists so much:

• remain in me,
• walk in the Spirit,
• whoever believes has life,
• I am the true vine.

And perhaps one of the deepest definitions given by Jesus himself is this:
sin is not believing in him.

But not believing in Jesus does not seem to be merely disagreeing intellectually with a religion.

It is not believing in the Life he revealed.
It is not believing in the Holy Spirit he sent.
It is not believing in the Christ being formed in us by the action of the Spirit.

Because there is only one mediator between God and men:
Christ Jesus, man.

Sin, then, stops being just “doing wrong things.”
It becomes living separated from Life.

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And perhaps that is exactly why the awareness of sin can become something beautiful.

Because it stops being accusation and becomes revelation.

Like a light turned on inside us.

Not to destroy us, but to show us that we were made for something greater.

The awareness of sin comes to reveal the distance between the human ego and the Life of the Spirit.

When we move away from Life, the ego takes control again:
fear, anxiety, vanity, accusation, rivalry and the need for dominance begin to flourish naturally.

And that changes everything.

Repentance stops being religious humiliation.
It becomes a return.

Back to Life.
Back to communion.
Back to Christ.

“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

Glory not as outward power, but as the manifestation of God’s presence in the ordinary human being.

And then everything begins to fit together:

• the fruit of the Spirit,
• the vine,
• the new birth,
• reconciliation,
• the love that bears all things,
• the formation of Christ in us.

Not by force.
Not by violence.
Not by the effort of the ego trying to be holy.

But by the Life of the Spirit working within man.

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Perhaps the gospel is precisely this:
not man trying to reach God,
but God forming Christ in man.