I
remember playing with lawn darts when I was a kid in the 1980s. Larger than regular darts and weighted at the
tip, these projectile of death were the source of 6,100 emergency room visits
and several deaths over the course of just a few years.[i] Playing with them was a lot of fun—when they
hit their target. But when they hit
people, they could do a lot of damage.
Sin is like lawn darts. It looks
like a lot of fun—until it hurts someone.
Preaching on sin is a lot like lawn
darts, too. When a pastor preaches on
sin, he can hit his target— in which case, people feel convicted and convinced
to change their ways. If he misses his
target, people just go home saying, “I have no idea what the sermon was about
today.” But sometimes the preacher
misses the target completely and hits someone by accident. Those kinds of sermons can do a lot of
damage. Ministers must remember that
when they preach on sin, the target is sin,
not the sinner. In our faithfulness to
God’s word and zeal to condemn sinful activity,
we must be careful to condemn no one. We
have to live by Jesus’ words, “Judge not,
that you be not judged (Matthew 7.1[ii]).”
It’s tough to preach on sin these
days. Fifty years ago, when the preacher
spoke about sin, people felt convicted.
Today when the preacher talks about sin, they just get offended. D.L. Moody said:
John Wesley used
to ask two questions of the young men whom he sent out to preach. The first
was, "Has anyone been converted?" The second question was,
"Did anyone get angry?"If the answer was, "No," he told
them he did not think the Lord had called them to preach the Gospel, and he
sent them back to their business. When the Holy Ghost convicts of sin, people
are either converted or--they don't like it and get mad.”[iii]
But still, we must preach on sin. To be faithful witnesses of the Good News, we
must first declare the bad news: that sin is real, and there’s a price to pay
for our perversity. In Jeremiah 17:1-10,
the prophet warned the people of Judah of the problem of sin. He told them that their sins were written
both on the altars of God, and on their own hearts. In their idolatry they had gone to the pagan
high places in their search for truth.
Today we also go to our high places.
We idolize people like doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists,
authors, scientists, and celebrities who we think have the truth. When we listen to what the world tells us
rather than what God’s Word says, we find ourselves to be like the people of
Judah—and God’s warnings for them apply to us as well.
Jeremiah warned of the penalty for
sin. He said that if the people
persisted in their way, they would lose their wealth, their heritage, their
freedom, and their blessing. He
cautioned them not to follow their own hearts as their source of truth—but to
seek God for life’s answers. Today, the
world tells us that if you want truth you should “follow your heart.” Our culture no longer believes in absolute
truth, insisting that truth is relative rather than fixed. “Your truth might be different from my truth,”
says the world. Since there’s no
reliable source of absolute truth, society tells us to look to our own hearts
for guidance. But God’s Word says
differently. Jeremiah 17.9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and
desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Our hearts will mislead us. They
will deceive us. But God’s Word shows us
unfailing truth for every day of our lives.
Jeremiah 17.7-8 promises that there is a
source of real truth. “Blessed is the man
who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He
is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and
does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not
anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” This echoes Psalm 1:2, which adds the
dimension of meditation on God’s Word.
Trusting in God and learning His Word are the ways to gain truth in this
world. Your heart will mislead you, but
God and His Word will not.
Instead of looking to our culture’s “high
places” for false truth that justifies sin and renames it as disease or
lifestyle or compulsion, take a look at what God’s Word calls it. Instead of trusting the word of society about
the Bible, try trusting the Bible’s word about the world. Then, instead of getting offended when you
hear about sin, you’ll be convicted of your need for a Savior. We can never be saved from sin unless we get
honest with ourselves about sin’s reality in our lives. But when we do admit our faults to God and
ask forgiveness, receiving the pardon of Jesus as God’s free gift, then we will
know the truth—and the truth will set us free (John 8.32).
[i]
Soniak, Matt. "How One
Dad Got Lawn Darts Banned." 2012. http://mentalfloss.com/article/31176/how-one-dad-got-lawn-darts-banned.
August 3, 2014.
[ii]
All scriptures taken from the ESV.
[iii]
D.L. Moody, in Resource, July/August, 1990.
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