The Sickness Of Sin

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 6:23

The changing of men is a primary mission of the church. The only way to change men is to get them converted to Jesus Christ. Then they will have the capacity to live up to the Christian command to “love thy neighbor” (Matthew 22:39).

There is no doubt that today we see social injustice everywhere. However, looking on our American scene Jesus would see something even deeper.

If only we would begin at the root of our problems, which is the disease of human nature that the Bible calls sin! This is why Christ came and died on the cross, this is why He shed His blood—to do something about this disease that mankind is suffering from.

We in the church today are in danger of becoming blundering social physicians, giving medicine here and putting ointment there on the sores of the world. But the sores break out again somewhere else. The great need is for the church to call in the Great Physician, who alone can properly diagnose the case. He will look beneath the mere skin eruptions and pronounce the cause of it all: “Sin!”

If we in the church want a cause to fight, let’s fight sin. Let’s reveal its hideousness. Let’s show that Jeremiah was correct when he said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). Then when the center of man’s trouble is dealt with, we can say with D. L. Moody, “Looking at the wound of sin will never save anyone. What you must do is look at the remedy.”

Our Father and our God, as the Great Physician please heal me from the wounds of sin that I have inflicted upon myself. Lead me from sin’s darkness into the Light of Your glory. And help me then to be in position to fight sin by leading others to that same Light. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Billy Graham, Unto the Hills: A Daily Devotional (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2010).