The topic I am talking about is Sin. We all know what it is right. Its when you do something that we wouldn’t do if the pastor was watching. Its what we don’t do so that our Mom’s aren’t disappointed in how they raised us. Its what we are saved from when Christ died for us. Its our natural nature. It drives a wedge between us and God. It is death. It is obviously bad… but what is it? Why and how does it work? Is it a constant? Is it defined before or after the consequences? Is it a noun or a verb?

Ok so we know more about what to do about the problem, than we do about how to actually define the problem. The problem with any explanation I have heard, is that it is lacking. There are two main bodies of thought on Sin, one is that Sin is “A known transgression against God” and the other is to “miss the mark.” One is intentional, and can not be done accidentally, also it requires that someone know that something is a sin, for it to be a sin to commit it. The other is accidental or on purpose, it is anything that doesn’t measure up to perfection. The problem I see is that both of these are ways to describe individual actions. It is to describe individual things that we do, one time events. From what I have recently been seeing, I will be blogging more over the next few weeks, maybe months, about this, so bear with me. I am starting to see that there are a few areas where I want to bring about the possibilities of possibly wrong or maybe just incomplete preconceived notions about sin and how it relates to Christians.

The first is that I do not believe God sent Jesus to die for our individual actions. Granted, those individual actions are a symptom, I believe that it is our sinful nature that Jesus died on the cross to forgive.

The second is that I do not believe that most of the time when the word sin is used in the English Bible, it is accurately represented. The reason for this is that the tenses used are wrong much of the time. When talking about sin, it is many times a tense in the greek, that is continual. It is both present and forward, and many times has the connotations of past as well. In that case, my request for the forgiveness of sins and the forgiveness I receive, may just mean future sins too… Who knows, I might start thinking once saved always saved… Even if someone lets their life go to crap… I don’t know… you will get a full blog on that trust me. Anyway, translating into English is always a problem, especially from an expressive and precise language such as Greek.

Lastly, I worry that we spend too much time worrying about how we should react to other people’s sins. I worry that we need to allow God to convict of certain sins, and that we may need to lay off… even other Christians, and for sure, we need to lay off those who are not believers. This is an issue of do we love each other and maybe God is working on other issues, and working on too many areas at once would be detrimental to someone. Maybe its a case by case basis for God to decided what it is that we need to work on and in what order we need to work on it.

Well those are some questions that have been bouncing around my head. This is going to take a lot of study, and when I see things, I will throw them in my blog for you to see too. Feel free to leave comments, I like the open debate they can foster. Feel free to disagree, but if you disagree, please back it up somehow biblicaly, and be ready because I will most likely ask you questions about the context of your verses, as well as if the Greek is meaning the same thing.

Some resources I love are

http://www.scripture4all.org/ – For the greek

http://www.biblegateway.com/ – For different translations into English

http://www.eliyah.com/lexicon.html – Strong’s Concordance stuff

http://www.gmail.com – for creating those anonymous posts so no one knows who you are so you don’t have to worry about offending anyone. I hope you don’t have to use it, but if you want to, you can.

One major prayer request that I have had for the past two to three years has been to get a new job, one that paid as well as my current job, and one that I would enjoy, or at the least, not hate. It didn’t matter which job I had, either being a phone agent, a tech lead, or a documentation expert, I did not like any of those jobs. I felt I was underpaid, and I felt that I was living under unrealistic expectations, all the while trying to pick up the slack for those who didn’t do their work themselves.

Well God answered both prayers, but not in the way I was expecting. I was expecting to get a job where I would be able to help develop tools, or explain technical data to executives who didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I thought maybe I would get a job with a non-profit helping people out somehow. I thought… That was the problem, God does not answer our prayers the way we think he should. God answered my prayer by giving me a peace about my job, he changed my attitude towards where I work. No pay raise at the time, no change in duties, no change in who I worked with, just a change in my attitude. It reminds me of the prayer I should have been praying, “being the same in mind as that of Christ Jesus.” I now know that the prayer should have been that God would change my heart to be content with where I was. Oh well, I think God likes to use things like that to grow us.

I have been content with my job for the past few months, but the money situation was super tight. I didn’t have a lot of money at the end of each month, in fact I generally ran out about 3-4 days before the end of each pay period and stressed about even finding enough to eat on the last two days… not that I would have gone hungry, I just really didn’t want to eat top Ramon again. Well I was praying and searching for a second job that I could either work super early in the mornings, or right after work untill supper time, and then be off the rest of the evening. I had been looking for a few months, nothing turned up, it seemed everyone had just finished hiring just as I applied. Home depot, Lowes, everyone was just not hiring at that particular time. I was stressing a little bit, how could I not find a minimum wage job as a second job? Well, I had figured out what I would have gotten and man, I figured it would be just enough to start saving, and start paying down debt faster.

Then the big news came just a week or so ago, I was at home after work and I get a call from my boss. Uh oh, this isn’t good, I only get called at home so I can either log in and take care of something at work, or I get the axe and will be asked to return all company equipment to the office ASAP. The conversation went something like this.

Boss: Hey, I don’t usually call anyone at home except for emergencies, and at least this isn’t one of those.
(My brain goes, hrmmm well I won’t have to start working after I am already off work, but its important enough to call me at home… I’m getting fired)
Me: Ok, so what’s up?
Boss: Well we put each individual in for a review of their position about six months ago for upper management to see what they thought of what was going on for everyone, and the results came back today.
(My brain goes, oh crap I had just started six months ago, and was still sucking at my job at that time. I’m getting fired)
Me: Ok, well I had heard rumors about that, but what does that mean now?
Boss: Well yours came back with some surprising results. We didn’t expect to have this happen to someone who had just started on the team, honestly its kind of crazy.
(My brain goes, yeup, fired)
Boss: You got a huge raise.
(My brain, yeap just got fired… WHAT!!?? I am so confused now how did that happen?)
Me: A what? how did that happen I thought we weren’t getting any raises any time soon?
Boss: Well we put in and asked for a certain amount figuring they would give us a third or half of what we asked for, and they gave us the whole thing. Here is your new pay grade it works out to be (about the same I would make at a part time job.)
Me: (slightly stunned) Wow, you can call me with news like that any time you want. Thank you for calling.

HUGE praise there. I didn’t expect to get a raise any time soon. I had resigned myself to trusting God, because I had enough money to live, I had what I needed and honestly God had been changing my heart to be content with whatever he provided rather than striving for more and more. Who knew? God did. He is amazing in our times where we begin trusting him, although I still do not know if my trust was from me, or from God. I am leaning towards God because if it were from me, it would have happened a long time ago.

Add to this, my friends that have been out of work, are starting to find jobs. Some are changing to better jobs, some that have been out of work over a year, are finding new jobs that pay a decent wage, and others are getting raises of their own. God is financially helping those who needed it. We can now afford to be generous ourselves, no more having to horde and scrimp on giving just because we want to eat for the next few days. God is amazing me in ways I can’t explain, so many prayer requests being answered in such a short time is kind of blowing my mind.

On another front, (a more impacting front) God has seen fit to bless me with an amazing woman of God to share in my life. He gave me a girlfriend who just knocks my socks off. To answer the age old question of, “where should I go to meet women?” I will have to answer with, at church. OK, so that is what I have said my whole life, and its something I always believed. I had gone to church my entire life, and had not really found that one person I wanted to get to know at a deeper than friend level. Usually we would get to be good friends and I would decide not to pursue any further for any set of given reasons.

About a year ago, I had decided to stop looking for a woman, my whole life I had been looking, and not finding what I was looking for, and I figured it might just be God’s desire for my life that I grow old alone. Not lonely by the way, just alone. In this way I could give way more time to serving God, I wouldn’t have to take time to take care of anyone else, I could throw myself whole heatedly at God and his purposes and ministries. Genuinely, I was happy with this, I was going to be at the center of God’s will with nothing to distract me. At this stage in life I could go to church at 8:00AM and stay till 10:00PM I could take the place of several other volunteers and relieve the stress of several ministry leaders. It was a great thing.

Then, several months ago I met a woman who kind of rocked my world. She was a strong Christian young woman, who actually liked studying the Bible, and getting to know God more and more. She was beautiful and she liked to talk as much as I did. She could actually quote scriptures with the reference (which blew my mind.) She was from an agricultural background. She had a large family, and had even attended a Nazarene church for a while… Wow, what a find. She, to me, is literally the perfect woman. Well I didn’t know all of this at first, I knew she was good looking and she liked going to church, so I figured we should be friends… well several months went by and we spent a ton of time together and through a somewhat tragic and humorous story we decided that we were more than “Just Friends.” and so now we are able to go through our days encouraging one another, and learning to be closer to God and to each other.

She is another one of those blessings from God that I don’t understand why he felt I deserved this. I obviously did not, but he blessed me anyway. He blesses us with so many things, even when we can’t seem to find them. Sometimes we can be blessed by what God is doing in others. One of my best friends just got married to another good friend, a blessing, and again if you had asked me two years ago if that was going to happen, I would have said no, he would die a bachelor with tons of friends, now he will die a happily married man with lots of friends, and I couldn’t be happier for the couple. I get to host/lead a small group in my home every week, and seeing the growth of those who are in the group is amazing. Seeing everyone, myself included, drawing closer to God, learning more about him, and his purpose in our lives is something I wouldn’t want to miss for anything.

At Church we have gone though some trials. We are always looking for more volunteers. We seem to never have enough. We get close to enough and then we grow again, and need more. I praise God that he entrusts us with so many people, but I pray that as he gives us more, he gives us even more. God is amazing and we have to remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that he will not give us more than we can handle, even if it isn’t comfortable, we will still be able to make it to the other end as long as we believe in him, and trust that he will provide when we don’t have everything we expect. Why can’t we believe this is true, we have story after story in the Bible, we have story after story from our friends and in our own lives… I pray that God will give us what we need, when we need it and that we will not worry about finding it for him. That we don’t lean on our own abilities to the extent that we cut God out of the equation. God can and will provide what we need when we are ready and in need of it, not before, not after. I can attest to that with my own life.

Thank you God for everything you have done for me, thank you for everything you have done for my friends and family. You are so amazing in ways that I can’t even describe correctly in words. I can only tell the stories of the events that have lead to my current feelings of gratitude. Someday you will be face to face with me, and I can praise you appropriately, forever and ever. There is no way to provide the depth of meaning, so I will have to infinitely praise you in the heavens at that time. There is no way, no action that can make up for what you have done for me, mentally, physically and most of all spiritually. I am so blessed by you. Thank you, again and again.

This all comes from Mark 9:50, what a troublemaker. Well I take a look, and then for the last few days I’ve been trying to figure it out for sure. All I can say is there isn’t any one predominant theory or proof as to what it means for sure. Some say that this is a way to show that there is a place of purification (purgatory) that everyone goes to be cleansed from their sins. Others say that it is speaking to the preservative properties, that all will be purified at some point. Still others say that it is talking about us being akin to a temple sacrifice, which all required salt and fire.

So, how do you find more about a topic like this? How would you go about differentiating which theory is correct? Every one of them can be backed up by other scriptures, and every one of them is as likely as the other to be correct… well with the exception of the purgatory reference, that one is a lot harder to initially see, and back up with other scriptures.

I could go on and on about which exact interpretation I believe is correct, but in the end, they both come up with the same point, so why would I want to worry about how I got to that same point? The point is that whether it shows us as being a sacrifice, or if it is being a purifying agent, at the end of the process we are forgiven, and seen as pure by God. This particular verse is right in the middle of a passage talking about removing what is impure from themselves, and this is just a sub point of doing good to others in the name of Jesus.

So the passage says be good to children, a radical and crazy concept at the time, and do little things for everyone. Even those who you don’t really think deserve our time or attention. He goes on after having the conversation steered away by John towards a man using the power of Jesus’ name even though he wasn’t a disciple, to say that again no one should turn a child away from him in any way, and to remove anything that might cause one to do that.

The sin here is the word “skandalizo” (skan-dal-id’-zo) which really means, to trip up, or to cause one to turn away to something different. It is an intentional changing of another’s path, or at least enticing them to change the way they are going. This whole passage uses the same Greek word translated as sin. It is saying that you should not allow yourself to lead others, or yourself astray, and to avoid that at all costs. We are then introduced to the Salt. I would have to go with the interpretation that the Salt is the way we can rid ourselves of what causes us to sin. This is done as if it were being purified in a sacrificial fire, which we all need to become pure in the first place. We have to continue in the fire, to continue the process of being salted, or we will lose our saltiness over time. Salt doesn’t immediately lose its saltiness, but it will if left to the elements. We should not allow ourselves, or others, to be lead away from what keeps us pure.

This mixed with a little bit of other passages makes a lot of sense. According to 2 Cor 5, we are warned to continue in our faith in Christ, to continue living for him, and then again in Hebrews 10 we see that it is a process of our lives with God that we are being made Holy by Christ’s sacrifice. We can see that we can be lead astray, that it is a continual process to be purified by Christ. Not that we aren’t forgiven, but if we want to become more and more of what Christ wants from us, we must continue to walk with Christ, and to continue to be purified by him, the only one who can do that. He is the only one who can continue to save us.

We were getting practice at writing and spelling and just being creative. It wasn’t about if we were correct in what we were doing, but that we were telling a story with full sentences I believe was the goal. I remember writing one in particular, it was around Halloween and we were supposed to write a Halloween story. Well I fancied myself a good writer and story teller so I started out, but thought my story would be much better if the letters had special effects, like if the O’s were kind of ghostly and had wavey lines, and if the e’s looked more like pumpkins, so I did my best to decorate my story as I was writing it.

Well it just so happens that the paper we were using had a top half and a bottom half. The top half was blank, so we could illustrate our stories, well needless to say, I took so long writing my story out all creepy and spooky that I didn’t have time to draw a picture. I barely had enough time to finish and get a hall pass to use the restroom. I thought it would be OK, I did a super job at writing that story, and it looked so scary, I bet a vampire would have been scared of reading that. A kid couldn’t have been prouder of their work at that time, the teacher had to be amazed when they read it… Apearantly I was wrong, my teacher wasn’t pleased. I got to learn an important lesson that day, and it wasn’t how to do creative writing, it was that we should do things the way someone expects them to be done, even if they didn’t tell us that in the first place.

I think everyone has stories like that, and by that I mean where we learn a lesson totally different than what may have been originally intended. This happens to me all the time when I am studying. For example I read chapter 15 of Romans and its a great treaties on how everyone is equal in God’s sight, both Jews and Gentiles are just as guilty and saved by faith. The way he proves this is by saying in verse four “For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” and then he goes on to list several old testament passages that show Jews and Gentiles both being blessed by God through faith.

Well I see this, and am reminded how applicable the Old testament truly is to our lives. This is something I often forget, and I have heard and know many other Christians have the same issue. I hear things like “The old testament is really just to set up the New Testament, so why would we pay much attention, just get straight to the grand finale and be done with it. We really just want to get to the heart of the matter and move on. While there is truth in that, it may not be the only reason for it being there. Think about it, why would God put something out there that was just to entertain, or just to be an extraneous piece of fluff?

There has to be a reason, in fact many reasons to study the old testament. One of which is used by the writer of Romans, which is to remind or realign a view that we may have allowed to get out of hand. He used old scriptures to remind everyone that God wasn’t just for the Jews, and in fact it had never been God’s intention to stick just to the nation of Israel, but to allow Israel to be a light to the rest of the world. Something many Jews had forgotten, or had never been something they had even thought about, as it wasn’t exactly the best idea to teach that at synagogue or to teach to the neighbors.

We can use the Old Testament as a source of encouragement. We have all been down on ourselves, and wanted to quit, or relax in something, but an inspiring story, or an anecdote has helped us to keep on course. In our walk with God, we can take the stories from the Old testament and see the power of our God, or of the longing God has to be with his people, or to see how God does punish those who stand against him, eventually, or how we need to wait for God or… There are just so many things we can take encouragement from, in the Old testament.

Then we get to the things everyone likes to bring up any time we ask about when dealing with the scriptures and that comes from 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is inspired by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.”  I mean seriously, we should all realize that the scriptures are there for teaching. There are lessons we can take and apply to our lives. We can use all of what we learn to allow God to help us become more righteous. (Remember its God who makes us righteous, not us) We can learn and teach from the scriptures. Just as there is encouragement, there are all sorts of examples to teach from in the Old testament, we just have to be careful that we are not taking something that was meant just for the Jewish nation and forcing it on the gentile believers as well. So we have to carefully divide the scriptures in that way, which takes study (which leads to learning… oh what a great cycle)

All of this, coming from a passage talking about something else. Its just a little bit that is mentioned, almost in passing in this passage. The verse just stuck out, it struck me in a way that shows me I should probably spend more time in the Old Testament, and more time in study. When I am not feeling encouraged, rather than my first though of going to friends, maybe I should spend some time with God in his word. I am glad I picked this up on this read through, now I have some things to think about for the next few days.