“. . . And Sin No More”

I have always considered myself a student. For the longest time, my wife and her family thought I was going to be a professional student. Can’t make money from that, but you can sure learn a lot of things. However, my teaching has always come from observing and watching human nature, and to be honest with you all, yes, mine included, and that, especially in the light of the Word of God.

As I started to mature and get older, and with some of the experiences I have been through with people of all ages, many times in the worst of natural circumstances, you start to see how people react the situations in the world around them.

The one thing that has never ceased to amaze me and even more so as I have grown in the knowledge of the Word of God, is how little human nature changes over the many, many decades and even centuries!

A television show that my wife and I used to watch a lot when we were younger were the different Star Trek series, from the first original one up until after Star Trek Voyager. Yes, we’ve probably also seen all the major movies as well, but the thing that I always found fascinating is that no matter how far into the future man has supposedly gone, according to the series, and how enlightened they have become, the writers could never get around that pesky problem of innate human nature! In fact they used that to create drama in so many story lines! But to me, that didn’t show a very enlightened nature for supposedly evolving so much from the base things like greed and lust, envy and even lying!

Which brings me to what I want to share today. Jesus said it more than once to those either caught in sin, or those suffering from a result of natural sin, “Go and sin no more.”

Pretty straight forward and pretty simple really. Yet for some reason and especially among very strong conservative Christians, in which I claim to also be, there is a tendency to bypass that, and by the way, all the compassion, empathy and love that is inherent in that phrase, and go straight to beating the sinner over the head with the horror of their sin. It’s like the mindset behind that kind of onslaught, is “we’ll show them how bad they are and for sure they will cry out to the Lord!” I mean, I will be honest with you, other than base human nature and the need to be either over people which puts you above them, I don’t understand the concept from a Christian perspective.