God-centered Living

A Relational Offense

Romans 1:18-25
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world,7 in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

Introduction

Sin, often viewed as a set of rules we break or actions we commit that separate us from God, is a deeper subject that goes beyond mere moral behavior. We tend to mainly think of sin regarding our outward actions and are naturally pretty good at identifying what we think of as good and bad behavior. We sense rather easily that it is wrong to lie, steal, kill, and commit adultery, and that it is good to be honest, work hard to provide for ourselves, love others, and be faithful to our spouses. Both Christians and secular people alike generally understand morality at this level without ever being told. Most secular people, if asked about the Christian concept of sin, would probably summarize it as simply breaking these general moral rules. They might also connect these types of moral rules to the Ten Commandments from the Bible and conclude that to sin is to break God’s commandments. Sin certainly includes all of these things—faulty morality and the breaking of God’s commandments, but the heart of sin is much deeper. The tendency for most people is to have a view of sin that is very man-centered. We want to simply think of sin in its horizontal dimension—the way it affects other people: lying, stealing, and killing is wrong because it harms others. Yet, to truly comprehend what sin is at its core, we must develop a view of sin that is thoroughly God-centered. We must first and foremost understand sin in it vertical dimension, the way it affects our relationship with God, if we are going to effectively grasp the truth of sin and the remedy for sin.

We must continually process the reality of sin at a deeper level than mere outward behavior, and this is necessary both for the purposes of evangelism and for Christian growth. Christians must rightly think about sin for their own progress and growth, but they must also be able to communicate the reality of sin effectively to those who may be skeptical of Christianity.  I’m rather convinced that many unbelievers, when presented with the Gospel message, don’t resonate with it on a gut level, because they don’t really understand sin. They simply do not feel like they are very bad people, despite the Bible’s insistence on the contrary. Sure, you may explain to them that God has a perfect standard and that if they have ever told one lie or stolen one candy bar then they have fallen short of God’s standard and are guilty of all of it. Still, sin may just feel kind of arbitrary to them, as if it has to do with a set of rules that God just made up for no reason. Sin does not hit them with any real force, because they just don’t feel like they are that bad. From their point of view, their lives still seem pretty moral altogether. Their head gets the biblical message of sin just fine, but their heart still does not see it. An attempt to share the Gospel can be stopped dead in its tracks if someone is completely disengaged emotionally to the truth being presented. The “head” stops listening, because the heart never started. Well, what are we to do then? We must be able to find ways to explain sin to people that appeal to the whole person, engaging both the head and heart. We must get to the heart of sin. And this is not just useful for evangelistic purposes. It is vital for our own growth and sanctification as believers, because we will always be stagnant and fledgling in our own spiritual lives if we are not continually aware of sin at the heart level and doing battle with it there.

 Sin is a heart issue, and it is deeply rooted in the nature of our relationship with God. The triune Godhead is and always has been relational, and God created man in His image as a thoroughly relational creature. It is the relational nature of sin, between us and God, that is key to grasping its true offense. To understand why sin is wrong- not merely that it is wrong, we must first recognize that, at its core, sin goes much deeper than outward behavior. Sin is God-rejection. Sin is a failure to honor and acknowledge the One who has given us life, love, and every single good thing we experience. It is an utter forsaking of the relationship between us and God. It is a failure to acknowledge God as God and the source of everything that is good. In Romans chapter 1, summarizing humanity’s sin and rejection of God, it says in verse 21 that “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him”. We all know God is there, every single one of us. Both the external reality of the creation around us and the internal reality of conscience continually witness to us the existence and supremacy of God. For that, we are held accountable.

Although we all know deep down the reality of God, because of humanity’s fall into sin, we neglect to honor Him the way that we should or give thanks to Him.  Of all the ways the apostle Paul could have summed up sin, he chose this little phrase. Notice, he didn’t say that we rebelled by breaking God’s law. In fact, when humanity fell into sin the law had not been given yet—in terms of the written commandments. But here, Paul is getting at something more foundational and more fundamental, to our breaking of God’s law- our disordered worship.  It says in verse 25 that “they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator”. We are born knowing that He is there and deserves our worship—our utmost affection. That is the fundamental truth of life. And that truth is meant for our ultimate joy. Yet, left to ourselves, we would rather give that affection away to anything and everything else, though nothing but God can sustain our all-consuming desires. He is showing us the problem in our hearts, chiefly, out of which the rest of our moral failures arise. Sin is not merely breaking God’s commandments. Sin is what causes us to break every single one of God’s commandments. The commandments of God serve to show us how sinful we already are in our hearts. Sin is our natural disposition to take our ultimate joy in anything besides God—the one who richly provides us with every good thing we have to enjoy (I Tim. 6:17). In meditating on this truth by way of illustration, perhaps we can arrive at a better understanding of sin and how we should both think and feel about it.

A Father, a son, and a football

To illustrate this, let’s consider a simple story: that of a father and his young son. This father has a deep love for his son, and everything he does is motivated by that love. He wants nothing more than to have a rich and intimate relationship with his son. He also happens to quite enjoy the game of football. So, for his son’s birthday, he plans to gift his son with his very first football. He dreams of all the quality bonding time he will have with his son playing catch together and learning to play the game. The gift is entirely motivated by its relationship building potential, and the son is fully aware of his father’s intentions. When it comes time to open the present, though, the son hurriedly rips off the wrapping paper, snatches the football, and without saying a word or acknowledging his father whatsoever, he runs out to the backyard to play with the football by himself.

Now, you can only imagine what the father would be feeling in that moment: hurt, disrespected, disappointed, even angry. The whole purpose of the gift was to enhance their relationship, not for it to be enjoyed in and of itself. The father was trying to express his love. He would be right to feel the way that he does, and any onlooker to this event would have an understandable disdain for the behavior of the son. Visualizing this scenario in your head, it simply feels gross and wrong. What an ungrateful brat that kid must be.

Of course, the purpose of this illustration is to shed light on our rejection of God. The football here is representative of every last thing in our lives down to our own flesh and blood and the very breath of our lungs. Everything we have is given to us by God, and everything in life is meant for us to relate to Him, enjoy Him, and to know Him better. He designed us as physical creatures in a physical world, giving us millions of different ways to experience Him through the things He has made. For the sake of thought, imagine that God only ever created spiritual beings and spiritual realities. Surely this was a possibility, since spiritual reality is all that existed before Genesis 1:1. He chose not to, however. In His spectacular creativity, He orchestrated an amazingly complex physical world with a myriad of different sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells. God wanted our relationship with Him to be vibrant, and exciting, and diverse! He designed countless different ways to experience Him and His goodness through His physical creation. The physical world acts as a sort of medium laced with spiritual insight which communicates the glory of God to our consciousness through our five senses. But what do we naturally do with the world of opportunity He has set before us? – We pretend as though life is full of all these things that are to be desired and enjoyed for their own inherent value. We want to enjoy the gifts but pay no mind to the Giver. We wish God would just leave us alone and let us enjoy ourselves. We practically act as though we have given this life to ourselves and have the right to do with it how we please. We naturally treat all of life like a football to be played with alone. We don’t offer the thanks that is due. We just take the gift and run. And we are guilty because of it.

Now the true offense to God is not quite like the offense in this illustration, because we have committed this offense on a cosmic scale. Every part of our existence falls within this offense, and as God is the source and essence of all that is good, it makes our offense altogether anti-good, or rather—evil. With the whole of our being, we have rejected good in favor of the illusion that we can be gods unto ourselves, and establish our own good.

Not only is our rejection of God in this way clearly wrong, it is also utterly foolish. When we treat all of God’s gifts as objects of our joy rather than means to enjoy God more fully, we not only trample on our relationship with God but also on our relationship with His gifts. His gifts were never meant to be enjoyed apart from Him and can never provide anything close to the true joy they were meant to bring when we fail to appropriately connect them back to Him. We ruin His gifts and ruin ourselves in pursuit of his gifts improperly. A football is ultimately a part of a team sport, but at the very least, it is meant to be enjoyed with a partner. You simply cannot play catch with yourself. I mean, you can try… but it just is not very exciting. You will get bored of that very quickly. This is our very problem, though, with how we handle so much of our lives! We do not acknowledge God with most of our lives, even as believers. We spend most of our time living in complete ignorance of God’s constant presence and provision for us, and so we often live dismal, frustrating, and unsatisfying lives. We simply spend most of our lives metaphorically kicking a football around in the backyard by ourselves and getting frustrated that we’re not having a better time.

The Fight for Truth

At the core of all sin is the rejection of truth and the embrace of lies. To reflect again on verse 25 of Romans 1, this is the great exchange that Paul talks about when he says, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” The lie we believe is that we can find fulfillment apart from God, that any created things around us—whether sex, money, good looks, or even family and good relationships—will give us what we were truly made for.  The truth is that everything in life is meant to point us back to God, to draw us into a deeper relationship with Him. Everything we experience is meant to be an occasion for us to love our Creator more fully, and everything in life is better and more enjoyable when used for this intended purpose of knowing and enjoying God. When we fail to acknowledge God, even in the presumably wholesome things of life- marriage, family, health, and even generosity, we are sinning. Everything in our lives both small and big is meant to be done with God. We cannot do anything completely morally good while forgetting God at the same time. Not acknowledging God is always sinful. If you feel like that is an entirely unattainable standard to live by, because most of your life is lived that way, that is a good thing to feel. You are really beginning to see the pervasiveness of sin. The greatest commandment from scripture is to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind (Matt. 22:37). That is not a commandment that any of us have perfectly obeyed for a single second of our lives. We are constantly not living up to this standard. We don’t understand how sinful we are most of the time like a fish doesn’t know how wet it is. You may feel like this all makes for an unfair standard, but make no mistake about it, God is not unjust. And fairness is not what we are after anyway. Afterall, the greatest Truth in life is not about fairness.

Understanding that knowing and enjoying God is the whole reason we exist is vital. It is also a wonderful delight. Psalm 16:11 assures us that in God’s presence there is “fullness of joy” and at His right hand there are “pleasures forevermore”. It makes perfect sense, then, that we should want to do every part of life with God and acknowledge Him in everything we do. To not want that seems insane, but it is the very predicament we have found ourselves in. God has never given us an actual reason to doubt that He knows what is best for us, yet we continually distrust Him. Every time we sin, we are saying, in essence, “I don’t trust God. I don’t believe this part of life is better with Him.”. When we sin, we make God out to be a liar. We distrust the pinnacle of trustworthiness, God Himself. Sin is exchanging truth for lies. It is a complete twisting of what is ultimately good for us. It is calling the bad good and the good bad. It is not knowing up from down and left from right. It is utter confusion. This confusion then breeds moral chaos. The truth about God and who He is for us is meant to hold an appropriate mass at the center of our lives, so that its gravity causes every one of our desires to orbit around it. When we exchange the truth about God for a lie, there is nothing left in all creation with enough weight to keep our lives in order. Without God at the center of our lives, our desires for all of His created things, including ourselves, are left spinning wildly out of control on a course of inevitable destruction. Every lie, every insult, every broken family, every war, every social injustice, and every murder has been the result of exchanging the truth about God for a lie.

Sin: A Grievous Moral Offense

Sin is not merely offensive and foolish, though. Understanding the relational offense of sin helps us to feel its weight more easily and assures us that sin is not arbitrary. It is rooted in the most central realities in the universe. But that is certainly not the end of the story.  Sin is also morally evil. God is holy, completely righteous, and pure goodness. All the attributes He possesses He has to infinite perfection. He is not merely wise, loving, good, powerful, and just. He is infinitely wise, infinitely loving, infinitely good, infinitely powerful, and infinitely just. Because of His infinite nature, the consequences of our sin are also infinite. The gravity of our offense against God is not simply about the act of sin itself but about the magnitude of the One we have offended. We have not just sinned against another finite being, but against the Creator of all things, the ultimate standard of goodness and justice. Therefore, our sin has infinite consequences, deserving of God’s infinite wrath. As the ultimate Judge of the universe, God has every right and responsibility to carry out justice. His wrath against sin is not petty or unjust; it is the righteous response of an infinitely holy God to our evil.

It is our tendency as humans to downplay sin, to treat it as some minor infraction, and as though God’s infinite wrath toward sin is a bit of an overreaction. But who are we kidding ourselves? God is the ultimate reality in the universe. Nothing exists outside of Him. Nothing could possibly be bigger. And no offense could possibly be bigger than the offense toward that being. Where do we get off thinking about what should or shouldn’t be God’s response to our sin? We know absolutely nothing about life but from the realities that God has placed in front of our eyes interpreted through the brains that He has given us. Who are we to question God?

The Gospel

 The gravity of our sin is immense, and this is why the Gospel message is so powerful. Thus far in this article, I have only briefly referenced the Gospel but not talked about it. Sin is exchanging the truth for lies, and we must live our lives in line with the truth, but without the Gospel the truth would be of no comfort. Without the Gospel, the only truth for us would be damnation and destruction. But now, because of the Gospel, we can trade a destiny of only death and destruction for one of unimaginable redemption and joy. This is the beauty of the Gospel: God, in His infinite mercy, sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to bear the full weight of our sin and satisfy the wrath of God in our place.

Through Jesus’ death on the cross, God’s justice was fully upheld, and His love for us was fully demonstrated. The punishment that we deserved for our rejection of Him—our failure to honor Him and acknowledge Him as the source of all good things—was poured out on Christ. Christ was rejected in our place and experienced the infinite death and destruction that should have been ours. And three days later, he rose again to new life, cementing the ultimate victory over sin and death for all who place their faith in Him. This is the Truth. Jesus came to embody truth and turn the truth from our greatest enemy to our closest friend. In John 14:6 Jesus says “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Not only does the truth of Jesus offer us the forgiveness of sin, but it also empowers us to live the life we were always meant to live—one of joy, purpose, and relationship with our Creator. It frees us from the lies we have believed about fulfillment and satisfaction and brings us back into the truth of who we were made to be: joyful worshipers of an infinitely awesome God.

The truth of the Gospel frees us from the frustrating cycle of lies and letdown that we are entangled in. Make no mistake about it, every human being is constantly chasing fulfillment—true fulfillment. It is the thing we are searching for when we get married, when we enjoy sex, when we get the promotion, when we enjoy a meal, when we click on the tv, or when we listen to our favorite music. We want to be truly satisfied—we want to be filled up, and we are looking for that in everything we do, whether in small or big doses. Our lives are led along by the enduring hope that somehow someway we will be able to find it, whatever it is. But our inability to find it, with the fullness we long for, will eventually leave us in frustration and despair. It is the truth of the Gospel that liberates us from that frustration. It liberates us to capitalize on the anticipatory nature of all of life’s pleasures. The Gospel not only gives us a new life but a new future. Life here and now is still not what it was meant to be, but if we are in Christ we no longer have to panic over our lack of ability to find ultimate fulfillment. Our ultimate satisfaction and joy is yet to come, but it’s as sure as the sky is blue, and it’s so near we can taste it if we try. When we experience the pleasures of life, now, in communion with God as believers, we experience them in anticipation without frustration, because we know there will be future consummation. The lack of fullness of joy here and now is no longer upsetting but rather exciting, because one day our joy will be full. The pleasures of this life now are altogether but a faint whisper of the divine glory that will be revealed on the final day, in which we will be taken up into and consumed with inexpressible joy. They are the simple daily aroma wafting into our consciousness of the grand feast that awaits us, which will be served to us by Christ Himself. What foolishness it is to continue to set our hearts on the things of the here and now for their own merit, trading a drop of amusement for an ocean of wonder.

Conclusion

In the end, sin is not simply about moral failure or rule-breaking—it is a deep relational breach between us and our Creator. Sin, at its core, is a failure to honor and acknowledge God as the source of all good things, and it is rooted in our desire to exchange that truth for lies. We often treat sin as a set of actions we should avoid, but at a much deeper level, sin is about neglecting the relationship that God has called us into. Sin isn’t just what we do to others; it is how our hearts turn continually away from God. It is a rejection of His love and a refusal to acknowledge His rightful place in our lives.

In the Gospel, we see God’s great plan to restore that relationship, to heal the breach caused by sin. The Gospel reveals that God’s primary purpose in redemption is to restore the relationship He designed us for—one of deep, unbroken communion with Him. God’s love for us is not abstract; it is intensely relational. The redemption that Christ won for us on the cross is not merely about forgiveness for our wrong actions but about restoring us to a life of intimacy with our Creator. The Gospel is a call to live in such a way that we see God as the central relationship in our lives which also provides the power to pursue that relationship. Redemption is not just about avoiding hell; it is about being brought back into the fullness of the life we were created for—knowing and enjoying God.

This is the way we must present the Gospel and present sin to those who are questioning it. It can’t merely be about recognizing bad behavior and turning from it after those sins have been forgiven. That will certainly follow after genuine faith, but true Gospel-driven repentance starts in the heart, because sin starts in the heart. True saving faith is about recognizing sin at the heart level, realizing what Christ did to pay the penalty for that sin, resting our lives on that truth, and then continually turning our hearts back to God because of who He is for us. All of that will result in outward behavior change. But outward behavior was never really the problem in the first place. This is what people must understand. This is why unbelievers are so wrong when the message of sin doesn’t resonate strongly with them. It doesn’t matter how moral someone has been or how good they have been to their neighbor when they have done all those things while entirely ignoring the reality of God in their lives. With no acknowledgement of God’s rightful place in all of that, their entire existence has been disrespectful, ungrateful, foolish, and evil.

God wants our whole hearts. He wants every single part of our lives. He deserves that. That’s the whole point of our existence. To refuse to give that to Him is only to our own detriment and shame. We were made to worship. We were made to stand before greatness simply to let our hearts sing over it. Nothing but God is great, and there’s nothing worthy of our worship but God. All the good things in the universe are only good, because they have dim hints of His greatness woven into them. As believers, let us always be battling sin, not merely because it is wrong, but because it is holding us back from the endlessly rich relationship with God that could be ours. That’s what makes it so wrong. Let us not for a second think any part of our lives falls outside of this. Every minute of every day should bear the objective of magnifying God’s goodness, with thankfulness, for the opportunity to exist in His world.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the ESV® Bible.