Sin Lite

[The following is excerpted from the book, Gather: Getting to the Heart of Going to Church, Copyright © 2021 by M. Hopson Boutot.]

“I have never sinned.”

I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I was outside a coffee shop in Atlanta, Georgia and my cookie-cutter evangelism encounter was falling apart before my eyes. In her defense, the woman I was talking with was a cyclist taking a brief caffeine pitstop. She probably wasn’t interested in an intense conversation about eternal life and the Ten Commandments with a twenty-something spiky-haired youth pastor in cargo shorts.

A decade and a half later, I’m still a firm believer that people need to understand the horrors of their sin before they’re ready to receive the hope of the Gospel. You need to get them lost before you can get them saved. Usually when I lead people to examine themselves against the Ten Commandments, they are quick to acknowledge their sinfulness. But that sweltering day in Atlanta was different. One commandment after another, this woman maintained her innocence.

To this day I don’t really know if this woman seriously believed she had never sinned, or if she was simply trying to enjoy her coffee in peace. Regardless, hers was merely a more honest version of the types of responses I normally receive when I share the Gospel. Sure, most people admit they’ve broken a commandment or two. But sin? Really? Isn’t that the really bad stuff? I mean, I haven’t killed anybody?

Sadly, many who identify as Christians have adopted a similar posture towards sin. Sin is the word we use for the really bad stuff. Things like murder, abortion, racism, adultery, abuse, and others. You know, the big stuff. Sure, we all mess up here and there. Everybody makes mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. But sin? Now you’ve taken things up a notch.

This sort of mindset will likely make a book like this hard to read. No need to judge a book by its cover when the title alone should do the trick. The sin of non-attendance? Are you kidding me? Smells legalistic at best and cultish at worst. Bear with me.

I am confident that far too many Christians struggle viewing non-attendance as a sin because they’ve traded the biblical doctrine of sin for a lite version. Great taste, less filling. Easy to swallow and easy to sell. So before we go anywhere, we need to ditch the bottle of Sin Lite and drink a draught of hamartiology.

And to that topic we’ll turn next week.