Abiding So As Not To Sin
I was raised in Protestant evangelical churches. By the time I came to confront the claims and teachings of the Lord Jesus I was in high school and I was very aware of how much sin had gripped me. And further I was aware of how much it still gripped me. The focus of so much evangelical spirituality is centered around sin and moral uprightness—which tends to lead people toward the kind of fake religiosity that our Lord condemned in the Jewish religious leaders of that day. In my experience, the leaders attempted to compensate for their emphasis on conversion, striving to live a pure and morally upright life and doctrinal clarity by emphasizing the grace of God towards us. We needed to be reminded constantly how much we were loved and that God was gracious to us because we felt the guilt of sin and the shame that reinforced those feelings of guilt. Since then I have been in evangelical churches that swung over toward the opposite error—of emphasizing God’s willingness to be mer