4 Ways Embracing Your Sin Serves the World

Tell me if you’ve heard this one: “You are a sinner.” 

You might have even heard Bible verses like Romans 3:23 to remind you of such. “All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory…”

Doesn’t exactly feel encouraging, right? Trust me, I get it. So many people who claim to follow Jesus have a tendency to emphasize your sin and your need to get rid of it, so you can be more like Jesus. However, there’s an argument to be made for embracing your sin and letting the work of Christ do the heavy lifting of transformation. Embracing your sin and owning who you truly are might be the first step toward becoming more like Jesus. If you can own your broken pieces, then the new life provided by Christ can finally be appreciated for its redeeming qualities. It’s precisely in that redemption that our sin actually becomes powerful beyond measure.

Sin has this nasty habit of sticking with humans regardless of their level of devotion to a higher power. “Good Christians” and “Non Believers” alike share the ever-so charming quality of sin being present in their lives. If this is the case, then perhaps it’s time for us to stop being disappointed and fearful of our sin and start accepting it as part of our nature.

If we constantly reject that sin is part of human nature, we strive and fail time and time again to be something we can never be on our own. Instead, we can accept the reality of our shortcomings and allow the good news of God’s grace to fill us with hope. Your sin is the part of you that Christ came to redeem. Where you fail, Christ doesn’t.

Have you ever received a gift you didn’t earn or deserve? It humbles you and fills you with another level of appreciation for the gift and gift giver, doesn’t it? The less worthy you feel of a gift, the more gratitude has the potential to well up. The catch is that undeserved gifts can also make you feel indebted to the gift giver – as if you need to pay it back somehow.

While humanity may portray a lifestyle of trying to honor God as healthy, it can mistakenly support the narrative that God requires something from us. In reality, God doesn’t require anything from us -- at all. The divine gift of grace requires nothing in return other than the belief that it’s free. Once you can believe that, a life of thanksgiving will follow.

The good news of Jesus is often lost in the declaration of his name. It can be seen in the countless members of churches proclaiming that people need Jesus. While the intentions of such a comment may be good, the divine grace of Jesus is actually lost. 

“You need to believe in Jesus” has become empty and corrupted by a misrepresentation that the power of Christ is something some people have access to and others don’t. It distances “sinners'' from God. The truth is that the good news of Christ meets you precisely where you are. The message of the gospel is that it’s precisely in your sin that Christ meets you. When we can accept that Christ meets us in our sin and not beyond it, amazing grace will become so much more than a song lyric. It will be understood as good news for all.

Embracing your sin quickly levels the playing field. In place of the holy ranking system that it has become, sin can actually be the stepping stone into understanding our shared human condition. The good news is that the redemption of Christ is completely inclusive of all sins, and therefore all sinners. 

When the magnitude of your sin has been redeemed, you become empowered through your humility and gratitude to treat others with the same level of unfair love and acceptance that Christ treats us. Your sin or “lack thereof” isn’t what separates you from others; it’s the exact opposite. It’s what we all share in common, and it’s what the redeeming grace of Christ has covered for all time.

Sign up for our weekly mailing list below and be notified every Monday of the new content we have coming up!