That One Sin
I Tim. 1:12-16
Intro:
In this small country church, there was a man, “brother Jones,” who would respond to the invitation and asked to be baptized at every gospel meeting (revival). On this particular Sunday, the visiting minister had preached a stirring sermon and when he asked for responses to the invitation, brother Jones hurried to the front. Everyone knew what brother Jones wanted. As the visiting preacher began to announce brother Jones’ intentions, a voice from the back of the room called out, “Don’t do it preacher. He leaks!” Why did this person feel that he needed to be baptized every time the invitation was issued?
We have all known people who had every right to be happy and secure in their relationship with God. But instead they go through life downcast and, whether expressed or not, doubt that they will ever make it passed those pearly gates into heaven. They never say confidently, “Yes! I am saved!” “Yes! I am going to heaven!” Instead they use phrases like, “I hope so.” I think so.” “I’m doing the best I can.” Their words and their tone of voice betray their thinking that, “No matter how hard I try, I’m just not ever going to make it into heaven.”
Now there are a variety of reasons people feel this way but in many cases, somewhere in their past is “That One Sin.” It is some sin or incident in their past that continues to drag them down spiritually. Like a ship that is dragging its anchor or like a person trying to swim with weights on his ankles. No matter how hard that person swims, he is pulled under the water again and again. It is a weight that over time, becomes heavier and heavier and requires more and more of their time and energy until they are pulled under for the last time and drown.
Who has this problem? Ironically the people who probably need to worry the most, don’t. Those people who go out Saturday night drinking and sleep off their hangover on Sunday don’t have this problem. They are too busy enjoying their sin. The people who are burdened down with their past sins are:
1. Our most faithful members. The ones who are the hardest workers. The ones who never miss a service. They are trying so hard to be good faithful Christians but they never seem to be able to do enough to erase “That One Sin” from their past.
2. The ones who used to be faithful but have given up and gone away from the church. They tried so hard to be faithful but finally the struggle became to great and they just gave up. “That One Sin” finally got the best of them.
3. The ones who just plod along in their Christian lives. Like an old mule or oxen pulling a plow. They are just putting one foot in front of another. They are Christians but show none of the joy of Christ in their face or their lives. Their present lives are absent of joy because they dwell on “That One Sin” in their past. They would say, “Yes, I know I am good now but in the past I was so bad.”
ILLUS: A chaplain at a state mental hospital tells of a patient at the state hospital who had an encounter with another girl in her dorm room at college. The patient had been a student at a Christian college. She had not gone home for Christmas because of her job. A few other girls also did not go home. To conserve energy, the college moved all the girls into rooms clustered at one part of the dorm. This young woman was sharing her room with another young woman. One cold winter night, the heat went out and they huddled together in one bed to keep warm. During the night they engaged in activities that both knew were wrong. As the years went by, that one incident began to weigh so heavily on this young woman’s mind and conscience that she was driven to the point of insanity. “That One Sin” had destroyed an otherwise wonderful Christian life.
People with the “That One Sin” syndrome tend to spend a great deal of time analyzing and scrutinizing “That One Sin” and their role in it. And they always see themselves as totally guilty. The sin that weighs so heavily on their souls could be something they did. It could be something they did not do. It might even be something that happened to them and someone else had convinced them that it was their fault that this bad thing happened to them.
This happens many times with victims of abuse such as spousal abuse, incest or rape. In their guilt and shame, they walk around with an invisible “Scarlet Letter” hung around their neck. We can’t see it but they can. It is a big red “G.” Guilty, guilty, guilty.
There are some traits common to everyone who suffers from the “That One Sin” syndrome.
They tend to look at their sins on a sliding scale. For instance, there is that little white lie and then there is that big black lie. Most, maybe even all our other sins can be forgiven but “That One Sin” is so bad, so immense that they see no way that God can forgive them. “That One Sin,” whatever it is, becomes their “Unforgivable Sin.”
God does not look at sin that way. To God, all sin is equally bad. Look at Gal. 5:19-21; Rev. 21:8 . . . All those “big” sins and all those “little” sins are all lumped together in one ugly mess. Remember, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for eating a piece of fruit. All sins are equal because all sins at their foundation have a single source, UNBELIEF.
The writer of Hebrews says plainly in Hebrews 3:17-18 that the disobedience of the Israelites in the wilderness was because of unbelief. So it is with all sin, no matter how large or small it is to us, it has as its foundation a lack of faith in God.
Because those suffering from the “That One Sin” syndrome look at sins on a sliding scale, they either cannot or will not accept the forgiveness of God for all their sins. They allow God to forgive all those little and even medium sized sins but not “That One Sin.” They seem unable or unwilling to let go of that sin and receive God’s forgiveness for it.
ILLUS: The Lord of the Rings was a blockbuster movie developed from a series of books written by J.R.R. Tolkien. The stories center around an ancient ring with magic power and the quest of a little hobbit named Frodo, to destroy it. Along the way Frodo encounters a whimpering, whining little creature named Smeagol who is obsessed with the ring. Through his obsession, the ring has turned Smeagol into a sniveling, conniving, murdering little creature who will do anything to have his “Precious” and prevent Frodo from destroying it. Smeagol cannot seem to see that his obsession with the ring is destroying him. Those who cling to “That One Sin” are allowing themselves to be destroyed by it so long as they do not accept God’s forgiveness of it.
God sees all sins alike and if he can forgive one, he can forgive all. If anyone had the right to have “That One Sin” syndrome, it was the apostle Paul. Saul of Tarsus, who later became known as Paul, was at the center of the great persecution of Christians recorded in the 8th chapter of Acts. But his life changed completely when he met Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul writes of his transformation from persecutor to apostle in I Tim. 1:12-16 . . . Paul is saying, “If God can forgive me, he can forgive and save anyone.
Paul also illustrates the reality that the closer we come to God, the greater our sins seem to us. Look at the different ways Paul describes himself over the years as he writes his various letters. In I Cor. 15:9, “For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God . . .” But in I Timothy, which is one of Paul’s last letters shortly before his death, he describes himself in I Tim. 1:15 as the foremost or greatest of all sinners. As Paul grew closer to God his perception of his sins changed. They became greater and greater in his sight. But he also adds in I Cor. 15:10, But by the grace of God I am what I am . . . And in I Tim. 1:16 Paul says, “I found mercy.”
Paul says in Rom. 3:23 that, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But Paul also says in Eph. 1:8 that “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace.”
This happened when we were baptized into Christ and became his disciple. But John says in I John 1:7 concerning the one who is living the Christian life, that the “blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin.” No just some, or most. All Sin! Big, little or in between.
Again in I John 1:9, John tells us that “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This is something that MUST be understood and accepted. It is really quite simple. We confess our sin. . . God forgives our sin. That sin that we have confessed, God has forgiven, and it is gone . . . FOREVER. How many of us have asked God to forgive the same sin more than once? Why???
Those who suffer from the “That One Sin” syndrome, fail to accept the truth that when Christ died for the whole world, he included them. In fact there are those that teach that Christ did not die for everyone but only for the elect which he chose before the beginning of time. But in Luke 19 when Jesus confronts Zaccheus and invites himself to Zaccheus’ house, he tells Zaccheus in vs. 10, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
In I Peter 2 when Peter is describing Jesus as our example, he says in vs. 24, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by his wounds you were healed.
In II Cor. 5, Paul is discussing our reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ, he states in Vs. 21, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” Jesus came to save the lost. He bore the sins of the lost in his body on the cross and became sin so that the lost might be saved. Who are the lost for whom Christ died? All the lost. Not some or most but ALL THE LOST. No exceptions.
Those who suffer from the “That One Sin” syndrome, fail to understand the nature of their salvation. Paul again and again refers to his salvation as an act of grace by God. Like Paul, we too are saved by grace through faith (Eph. 2:8). We cannot earn our salvation, we certainly do not deserve our salvation, but God through his grace and mercy extends salvation to us as a gift through his beloved Son Jesus Christ.
We can never do enough good works to blot out even one of our sins. But what we cannot do, Christ did for us when he died on the cross. When we confess publicly that we believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and allow ourselves to be immersed in water so that his blood can wash away our sins, we come up out of that water completely clean. ALL of our sins are washed away and we are justified. God looks at us as being perfect, just as if we had never sinned.
Conclusion: How can we keep from suffering from the “That One Sin” syndrome? We need to focus more on the future than on the past. Paul said in Phil 3:8 as he talked about his goal of going to heaven that he was, “forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead.” We too need to forget our sins of the past. If we have accepted God’s gift of salvation through grace, all our past sins are forgiven, blotted out and blown away. And as long as we continue to live the Christian life, however imperfectly that might be, the blood of Christ continues to wash our sins away so that we need never be out of fellowship with God.
We need to look at our sins as God does. There are no small or great sins, there are just sins. God can and will forgive ALL our sins if we but repent and confess those sins to him. We need to remember that Christ came to seek and save all of us. He died on the cross for all of us. We must understand that we cannot do enough to abolish “That One Sin” ourselves. But what we cannot do, Christ can and did through his sacrificial death. We must not cling to “That One Sin.” It will destroy us if we do. Instead we must accept God’s forgiveness and rejoice in our salvation.
This sermon was developed from a chapter “That One Sin” found in “Spiritual Depression: Its causes and cure” by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
