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Our Worship of Idle (Sloth)
Brian Mashburn
February 3, 2013
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Sin Mixed In
Most everyone reading this article loves God.
Their love is genuine and sincere, grateful and weighty. God has made a difference in their life. His Gospel has impacted them and filled them with forgiveness and hope. What needs to be addressed is not the lack of love for God, but the presence of sins that are mixed in with it.
Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians that it is God's will that they be sanctified. He uses words like purity, holy, and honorable to describe what their aim should be, and words like impure, sinful, and "like the heathen" to expose what they needed to address (1 Thessalonians 4).
It seems that they had the life of loving God (they were saved), but they had the death of sin mixed in (they were compromised). Sanctification, therefore, is the continuing removal of "death" from the life of a Christian.
There is a historical Christian list of "Seven Deadly Sins" that has survived the test of time (centuries!) exposing the predominant attitudes underlying all sinful actions. They do not occur as a formal list anywhere in the Bible, but are found consistently all through it - appropriate, since they are also found all through the lives of men.
Let us use them as a guide, church, to be sanctified. My prayer is that we are all noticeably holier, visibly more like Christ than we are now, by the end of this series.
For that to happen, we will all have to deal with today's deadly sin: sloth. May we awaken from the sleep of complacency.