Happy Fourth of July! This sermon was preached in-person on July 4 & 5, as well as online for July 5 (video and audio below). Lots of sources this week that I found helpful, including from Tim White, James Howell, and Marshall Jolly at Modern Metanoia.
Do you believe people are basically good or evil? On this Independence Day weekend, we’re looking at a great passage from Romans 7:15-25a, where Paul writes of his frustration with his sinful nature: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Perhaps you can relate.
A sermon on our eternal freedom in Jesus Christ and everyone’s favorite topic, the nature of sin.
Grace to you and peace from the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
How many of you would agree with the statement “People are basically good?”
In studies, most people agree people are basically good, although over the last 30 years, the percentage of Americans who believe that has fallen substantially, from over 80% to under 70%.
You don’t have to look very far into humanity’s history to find evidence of evil and sin though, do you? We’ve proven ourselves very good at violence and warfare, even genocide. Our need for all sorts of laws to keep order and restrain people from doing evil in society is more evidence.
But even if it’s easy to think of exceptions, I think we tend to think—or at least hope—that most people are basically good, especially if we take something like serial killers as the standard of comparison!
We often assume babies are fundamentally innocent and at some point, as they grow older, they learn how to sin.
You’ve heard the phrase, “the innocence of youth,” right?
We assume growing up includes learning sin. Somehow, learning the difference between good and evil means we’ll sometimes choose the wrong.
If sin means making the wrong moral decision, then it makes sense that you have to be old enough to know what you’re doing before you can sin. It’s strange to think of my six-month-old son as a sinner, because he’s not capable of moral reasoning, but listen to what the Bible says.
Psalm 14 says “The Lord looks down from heaven on human kind to see if there are any…who seek after God…there is no one who does good, no, not one.” Paul says in Romans 3 that all have sinned.
Psalm 51 says sin starts even before birth. Psalm 51:5 says “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.” There aren’t many moral choices you can make before you’re born, so you wouldn’t think an unborn child could be sinful, but it’s in the Bible.
Maybe we should pause a moment and think about what that little three letter word “sin” actually means.
Merriam-Webster says sin is “an offense against religious or moral law.” Sin is breaking the law, doing the wrong thing, but it’s more than that.
The dictionary’s second definition says sin is a “transgression of the law of God; a vitiated state of human nature in which the self is estranged from God.”
That last part is actually a fantastic definition of sin, although I had to look up “vitiated” (don’t you love when the definition of a word includes other words you don’t know?) – turns out vitiated means spoiled or quality-impaired.
So sin is an impaired, broken state of human nature in which the self is estranged from God. Estranged is perfect there, because that’s what sin does: It separates.
Sin breaks relationships, it separates us from God and from each other. Sin is us desiring to be in control instead of allowing God to be the one in charge. Sin is looking for life somewhere other than from God, the Creator and source of life.
In the very beginning of the Bible, in the beginning of the human story, sin is rebellion against God, choosing to eat the forbidden fruit, taking for ourselves the one thing God set as off-limits.
Sin is greed and idolatry, selfishly wanting to take the place of God, saying “I know best, I’m in charge, I’m free to do whatever I want,” trying to help myself. Just about sinful act you can think of fits into that – murder, theft, unfaithfulness to your spouse, violence; it’s all about putting yourself first.
My son Micah can’t do much on his own, and most of the 10 commandments don’t apply to him yet, but he is definitely selfish. Everything he does is for his own benefit. I don’t have a hard time accepting that humans are sinful from the beginning.
The Greek word the Bible uses for sin is “hamartia” and it literally means “to miss the mark.” Aristotle uses it to talk about archers whose arrows miss their target.
To sin is to miss the mark, to fall short of the standard, to not measure up. If the standard is to be better than mass murderers, that’s not too hard to measure up to. But the standard is much higher, because the standard is God. The mark is the sinless life Jesus lived, and none of us measure up to that.
So when we talk about sin breaking relationships, we’re looking at how we’ve missed the mark in our relationships. How have I missed the mark in my friendships, or with my family?
How have I missed the mark in my relationship with God?
Are people basically good or evil?
Well, if people were basically good, we wouldn’t need a savior. Good people might occasionally slip up and do something wrong, but they’d probably be able to make up for it.
Make a few extra donations to a good cause, help someone across the street, maybe volunteer to pack food a few times a year, and you’d have the scales balanced.
Paul says, “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”
The reality is all of us have a tremendous capacity for evil. We all want to do the right thing (at least I hope we do!) but our default is to put ourselves first, not to love and serve others. Our default is to want control. Our default is selfishness and greed. Our default is sin. Even when I manage to do something good, there’s nearly always some benefit to me.
Listen to the next verse: “I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand.” Sounds true to me. It’s not a very happy thought; it’s not a nice thing to believe, but I think it’s true. It’s an addiction, where even if we want to stop sinning, even if we want to restore the relationships broken by sin, even if we want to make the right choice to return to God, our best efforts aren’t enough. We confess we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
Today is an interesting day to wrestle with this idea of captivity to sin, because for our nation, this weekend is about celebrating freedom. We really like thinking of ourselves as free, as if we control our own destiny.
But political freedom is not the same as spiritual freedom. It’s like a prisoner who is free to go from one side of the cell to the other side, free to stand up or sit down, but still a prisoner locked into a cell. Earthly freedom is not the same as eternal freedom. Eternal freedom doesn’t come from an army or a constitution or the right to vote; it comes from following and serving Jesus Christ, truly putting Jesus in first place.
James Howell says, “It’s only in Paul’s realization that the good I try to do, I can’t, and the evil I am determined to avoid, I can’t, that we can throw ourselves in hopeful despair on the healing mercy of God.”
I love today’s reading first because it’s honest. You can find lots of self-help books about how if you just change something in your life, if you just get the right morning routine, or stop eating sugar, or exercise more, or whatever, then you’ll be ok. The Christian version is that if you just pray more, or just resist some particular temptation hard enough, then you’ll be good.
But that’s not what Paul’s experienced. Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
I need help to get free of my sin. As hard as I try, nothing is good enough. I never measure up to the standard God calls me to, the standard my Creator intends for me. I always miss the mark. So do you.
We need a savior, a liberator, someone to set us free from our captivity to sin, to give us new life. And as Paul concludes this section of his letter, thank God, that’s exactly what we have.
Jesus has done what we could never do. I keep going back to that great verse we looked at a few weeks ago from two chapters earlier. God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners, Christ died for us.
Jesus Christ died for you. Your sins have been forgiven. You are set free. In another letter, Paul writes, “In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” That’s from 1 Corinthians 5.
God is in the business of restoring the relationships destroyed by sin, bringing reconciliation where sin has caused division, restoring this world broken by sin to the good creation it was always intended to be.
Going back to the first question: Are people basically good or evil?
The Lutheran answer is yes, we are. It’s a both/and. Martin Luther described it in Latin as “simul justus et peccator” which means, “simultaneously justified and sinner.”
By dying for us on the cross, Jesus has justified us and claimed us as saints, as God’s people. And yet, sin is still present and active in this world and in our lives, and until the day we die, we stay mired in our selfish sins.
Again, that’s an honest assessment of who we are and what Jesus has done for us. We are 100% saint and sinner.
And although we continue to fall short and miss the mark, although we continue to cling to sin whether we want to or not, God continues to give us grace. Jesus continues calling us out into freedom, redeeming our brokenness, and saving us in spite of ourselves.
Let’s pray.
Lord Jesus, thank you for coming to us in our sin, for giving your life to set us free. Thank you for defeating the power of death by rising again, so that we too might be given new life, eternal life with you.
Help us to live as your people, to rejoice always in the freedom you have won for us. Forgive us when we slip and fall back into sin.
Thank you for rescuing us. Help us to live for you and love our neighbor, in your holy name. Amen