How Dare You! Series

In a “Call to Missions” issued by our Evangelist Presbyter, Clark Cowden, he reminded us of this, “Our missional work in the past has predominantly focused on the physical, worldly needs of people. This is an admirable goal, but it was not the prime directive of the Great Commission. A people are not ultimately changed by better jobs, but by a change in their spiritual lives. We must be feeding them with food, both of this world and the eternal life that is their ultimate destination.”

I suspect that more people realize they’re in trouble than they let on. It does seem that everybody agrees something’s not right. They’re just not sure what. Some people call it dysfunction, some bad karma or psychic voids; some attribute their problems to oppression or social ills; some even turn to radical and even violent teachings that paint the world in black and white because it’s easier to understand. I believe that most people intuitively know, however, that something is very wrong with this world, and they also intuitively know that to correct it, one must begin with one’s self. But how?

There’s everything out there in the supermarket of ideas to help remedy most situations. We get sick, and go to the doctor. We’re too fat—go to Weight Watchers. We drink too much – alcoholics anonymous. If we’re affected by depression—there’s counselors and a plethora of magic pills. But the one thing that the world never tells you is,

• Our real problem . . . our real disease is SIN.

SIN is one of those 3-letter words that’s not politically correct to talk about today. The fact is, however, without salvation from sin, all our mission efforts will be for nothing. We’re more at home talking about diseases and mental illness than we are in talking about “the heart of sin.”

There are two types of sin we need to consider:

• One is personal sins. These are the sins that you and I commit ourselves on a sometimes daily basis. The English word “sin” is a translation of the Greek, “hamartia”. It means to “miss the mark”. There’s plenty of times, I admit, that I sure “miss the mark”! I suspect most of us know the experience. It’s these sins for which we need forgiveness.

• But perhaps even more profound is corporate sin. This is the sin that is so much a part of our world that we hardly notice it. It’s this sin that Paul says “entered into the world through the one man” when Adam took that fruit. And by the way, I read that the real problem in Eden wasn’t the “apple in the tree.” The real problem was the “pair on the ground.”

Nevertheless, corporate sin is what clouds our judgment, twists our motives and distorts our relationships. It’s this sin that we cannot escape because it affects us all so profoundly. It’s these sins that we’ve allowed to be considered “normal” even though God says otherwise.

A plague was ravaging a tiny village in the outermost bush of a remote African province. A lone missionary, a doctor who had given his life to fighting this particular disease, had gone in with the only cure available. It was made from plants indigenous to the region and could quite easily be reproduced by the villagers.