"Different Kinds Of Sins"

“Different Kinds Of Sin”

INTRODUCTION: Tonight, we’re going to talk about SIN … always an interesting topic … one that we all know a lot about … from personal experience.

When we talk about sin, there are 2 things that we find:

• Man makes so little of it.

• God makes so much of it.

Man JOKES about it … even BRAGS about it. Man thinks of sin as a HANG-UP that Christians have. Man thinks sin is ENTERTAINING … most of the TV shows and movies are centered around sin.

God says that the “wages of sin is death” … eternal death in the Lake of Fire. God says that “the souls that sinneth shall die”. God says that sin is a very serious matter.

Sin is UNIVERSAL … you can’t escape it. No matter where you go in the world, you will find sin. Sin can’t be ESCAPED … BUT … it can be OVERCOME … by the power of God. We know that sin exists … OTHERWISE … there wouldn’t be any jails … or locks on your cars & houses.

TONIGHT … we’re going to find out what sin is. Some say that sin is just a weakness of the flesh … the absence of society’s morals. Some say that sin is the nature of the beast revealing the evolution of man … that it shows that man hasn’t completely evolved yet. Some say that sin is a disease, a sickness of the mind … mental, not spiritual.

BUT … what does the BIBLE say? We all know how sin came into the world. It didn’t originate with Adam & Eve. Sin originated with the Devil … with Lucifer … BEFORE he became Satan, the Devil. BUT … sin entered the world of MANKIND through Adam.

Lucifer fell from perfection when he exerted his will above the will of God – Isaiah 14:12-14 – ribbon. When Satan tempted Eve, she was DECEIVED … AND … ate of the fruit of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil”. Adam ate WITHOUT DECEPTION … knowingly. When he sinned, as the corporate head of the human race, his seed became corrupt. That’s why we must be BORN-AGAIN - 1 Peter 1:23 – “Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever.”

SO … we are sinners BY NATURE. You don’t have to teach children to be bad, tell a lie, etc. We are ALSO SINNERS BY CHOICE. THUS … we are responsible to God for the sins we commit.

HOW DO WE SIN? WHAT KINDS OF SIN DO WE COMMIT?

I.- SINS OF COMMISSION – These are through DIRECT DISOBEDIENCE to God.

There are different words in the Bible for “sin”. We don’t see them that clearly in the English translations, so we’ll look at the GREEK to clarify “sin”.

1.- Romans 3:23 – “sin” = “hamartia” = ‘missing the mark’. The TARGET, the BULL’S EYE, is God’s perfect will. We sin when we “miss the mark” … i.e., anything other than the “bull’s eye” of God’s perfect will. How many times in a day, or hour, do we miss the bull’s eye? We miss God’s standard for perfection … we “come short of the glory of God”.

2.- Romans 5:19 – “disobedience” = “parakoe” = ‘to fail to hear’. Have you ever HEARD someone talking to you, but failed to HEAR them? Sometimes, it’s called “selective hearing”! Sometimes we get busy reading the paper, watching TV, etc. … AND … we are only half-listening to what someone is saying.

The same is true with SIN. God is speaking to us, and we only half-listen. That happened to Adam - Genesis 2:16-17 – “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: [17] But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

Adam wasn’t paying attention to God, when God spoke … AND … he ended up DISOBEYING God. We do the same thing, don’t we? We get so involved in what we WANT to do … what we LIKE to do … that we don’t pay attention to God speaking to us.

How do we know what God is saying? So we wouldn’t FORGET what He says, He wrote it down for us. It’s called the BIBLE. In it, you will find God’s “bull’s eye”. We need to LISTEN to Him when He speaks to us.

3.- 1 Timothy 2:14 – “transgression” = “parabasis” = ‘to go to the wrong side of the law’. This is like John Wayne telling Billy the Kid that he’s on “the wrong side of the law”. There’s a RIGHT side, and a WRONG side of the law … there’s no MIDDLE ground.