When I was asked to write this article, and when I saw the topic I thought, what a great question—Why are Christians so hard on sin? Aren’t Christians supposed to be loving and kind people? The answer to this question can be the foundation for anyone’s life as a Christian, so let me answer the question as best I know. I was given a limit on the length of this article, but to be honest the answer to this question can be summed up in just a few words. The most obvious answer is that we are hard on sin because God hates sin. Let me explain.
I need to emphasis this point; God does not hate the sinner, but the sin. As a matter of fact, God loves the sinner so much that the bible tells us in Romans 5:8, “…that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” to remove our sin. His death was the payment for our sin, so God’s love was so strong for all humanity that His plan from the time of Adam was to pay for our sin with the ultimate sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ. Does God hate sin, Yes, does God hate the sinner? No!
The Bible is consistent in telling us to cease from sinning, yet even after we have received Christ as our Savior, we continue to fall short of the target God has for all of us—to live without sin. The well-quoted verse by Christians and non-Christians alike is Romans 3:23 “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” This verse is quoted so often because it is true, and sometimes people use it to justify their sin.
In Romans 6 the Apostle Paul asks if God showed such marvelous grace to us in sending Jesus, why don’t we just continue in our sin so that grace could abound, and God could be seen even more. Well, Paul says that’s nonsense! We are called to a higher purpose than to make a mockery of God’s grace. We mock God by staying in the sin He died to free us from.
The prophet Isaiah wrote these words some 700 years before Christ was born in Isaiah 59:2 “But your iniquities, (sin) have separated you from your God, and your sins have (hidden) His face from you, that He will not hear.” I added the word sin, but that is the definition of iniquities, this is just a truth that can not be overlooked. Your relationship with the God who loves you, is affected to the point of Him not being able to communicate with you, not because God is so bad, but because of the sin that separates us from Him. Before we accepted Him as our Savior, we did not have a relationship with God, but now that we do, why would we want to be a part of anything that will harm that relationship. God paid a very high price to have our relationship with Him restored, and it is only sin in our life that can separate that connection we have with Him.
So, Christians are hard on sin! We live in a world that is full of self-serving, God separating sin and we need to be tough on it. Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The problems and temptations we face daily are not unforeseen obstacles randomly placed in our way, there is a power and directive from Satan to assist us in falling away from our Lord. His plan is to make sin so accepted and ordinary that we do not even consider it sin anymore. His goal is to make all sin look, feel, and act as normal. If it’s normal then it must be OK, right? WRONG! Our world is a wonderful place to live, but it is also a place full of temptations and sin. Is it our job, no? It is our honor to live out faith in a difficult world.
There is a quotation by Theodore Roosevelt that makes my point, he said this “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty…I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.” So be hard on sin, but love the sinner!