It’s like, now you see it…now you don’t. It was there and then it was gone.

Sin is easy to identify and difficult to forget. We know sin. We would certainly be able to identify it in a police line up! Sometimes we are so familiar with sin, there are specific smells or tastes to our sin. We can get so comfortable with sin that we don’t feel “normal” if we aren’t carrying it around. In some cases, sin can be carried around for years and we are so attached we can’t loosen our grip of it.

We struggle with sin our entire lives. It’s something we can’t seem to get away from. We further have a hard time forgetting about it even if someone says we are forgiven. Sin really has a hold on us; I mean we were born with it after all, right?

But God says to us that he loves us so much he is sacrificing his own son in order for our sin to be forgiven and taken away. What? How does this even happen? It makes no sense whatsoever. Someone has to die so my sins are forgiven. It’s hard to understand. This concept of wiping away our sins or that they have washed clean by the blood of the cross is, well, messy. How does something become clean with blood? It’s just not something our human minds can grasp. But that’s the key, we can’t look at sin through our humanness and expect to see it as God sees it.

God sees our sin as the thing that keeps us from being in relationship with him. It is all of the times we turn away from God and allow the world’s views and ways to take control. God is saying that through Jesus’ death, he bore all of our sin, took them with him to death and Jesus’ blood takes away all of the sin that was and will be, ever. This is not something we can wrap our brains around if we don’t look at it through the eyes of faith.

When we look at sin through the eyes of faith, we can follow the trajectory from beginning to the end. We know sin began in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve; original sin. This sin of turning from God and listening to the serpent (the world) is the only thing we bring into this world. We are born with original sin and our ultimate goal is to come to know God and choose him so the sin can be no more. It is FAITH that allows us to understand how, when we come to know God, we know he is love and when we choose love (to be loved and to love others), it is hard to sin. Why? It’s easy, we want to be in communion and peace with God and sin causes division in that scenario.

During Lent, we spent weeks preparing ourselves, fasting and giving to others and spending time in prayer. We are now ready for this Easter season. We have the strength to leave behind bad habits (ie. the thing you gave up for Lent that you continue not to) behind and perhaps created some good habits that keep us in line with God’s teaching. When we are walking the walk and talking the talk, it’s harder to be tempted by the sin. This is God’s plan and wish for each of us. He sacrificed his son so we can come to understand the depth of his love for us AND so we would choose to come back to him. Thank you God for taking my sin away!!!