Missing the mark of His Love

The state of a heart turned away from God inevitably affects how we live life and the choices we make. Sin has huge repercussions in our lives, to whatever extent we are turned away from God. We are only able to receive God’s Love according to the extent our hearts are turned towards him and the extent our hearts are open to receive it. Similarly, his Love only begins to affect our values and our behaviour according to the extent to which we have received God’s Love.

In a sense sin is a bit like a cancer that spreads through the body, to use a medical analogy. As we turn away from God, as we reject his Love and cut ourselves off from His Love, the cancer of un-love (self-centredness, greed, egotism, rebellion against God’s Love) becomes embedded in our hearts. The more the ‘cancer’ progresses, the clearer the symptoms. The more lovelessness takes root in our hearts, the more our values and then our behaviour are affected by it.

The more we remain turned away from God, the more we expose ourselves to Satan’s patterns of self-centredness, of jealousy, of greed, of wanting to be our own master. Strongholds begin to form in our hearts: our responses become habits, habits in turn become so deep-seated that they establish themselves as strongholds in our lives. Our responses, our habits, the strongholds that have established themselves in our hearts determine the choices we make and affect our behaviour.

And so sin, as well as being the state of our hearts in relation to God, is very much our actions. Our behaviour cannot be divorced from the state of our hearts, just as the symptoms of an illness cannot be divorced from the illness itself. When we behave in a way that misses the mark of his glory, that misses the mark of God’s way of Love, we sin. Behaviour that is not rooted in God’s Love is sinful. And because none of us truly allow God’s Love to infuse us and mould us and shape us, we are all sinful. We all fall short of living in the light of God’s Love.

The way I understand it, sin, then, is not about not being good enough because our actions don’t match up to God’s standards. It is not about failing to reach a particular standard because our efforts are not good enough, because we aren’t trying hard enough. Sin is falling short of God’s character (I guess that could be seen as failing to reach God’s standard) not because we have tried and failed, but because we are not living in the light of God’s Love, we are not fully saturated by it which ultimately affects our thoughts, our attitudes and our deeds. 

For me it has been crucial and incredibly liberating to get this the right way round: it is not specific (mis)deeds that make me sinful – rather it is the sinful state of my heart that causes my specific (mis)deeds. My sinful behaviour, the things we I wrong, the way I fall short of God's ways, is the outworking of not allowing God’s Love to fully penetrate my life.