Number 47

Well, it's that time for me to write about this week's sermon. As you may recall we are doing a series on the book of Romans. This week I was really stoked about the message as our pastor was going deeper into an explanation of how the Gospel is logical. I was having a bit of a hard time understanding that. Nick took really great sermon notes so I got a look at how the sermon flowed and all but they were his thoughts and not mine which are very hard to turn into a post. We were just finishing up the final song in our worship time when out of the corner of Nick's eye he noticed the #47 flashing on the screen. One of our children was in need of a mom and I had to run to their aid.

It was Brooklyn, and this was the first time she needed us! We had been to church much earlier than usual this week because of another initiative for families the church has been doing and so she ate a bit earlier and just needed some food. No biggie. Except this girl has the loudest suck in the world! I absolutely cannot discreetly feed her!! So I was out in the foyer hoping to hear but got into some conversations with the other moms out there entertaining their toddlers and missed much of the sermon.

The point that I came in on is enough topic for an entire post though. Basically the pastor was using a chunk of Romans to describe how certain things in the Gospel need to happen because of how society is going, and how God knew it would go. (I'm really unsure how to describe it cuz I missed most of it, so I'm just going to skip to the point). He was talking about the journey toward moral depravity in society and he stated that as Christians we've lost our ability to call sin sin.

Once he said that I was completely distracted from the rest of the sermon and could not focus back. I don't know what you would do when you hear that statement but my mind immediately jumped to the issue of homosexuality. Just because it seems to be something we're really tolerating and not wanting to step on anyone's toes about, when God clearly states that homosexual acts are sin. (I'm not looking to start up a debate here, but he does.)

Our pastor approached that with saying it is a sin. Just like lying and stealing. There is no difference in 'sin scale' between homosexual acts and lying. I didn't need a reminder of that as I really don't believe in any sort of sin scale, but I began to wonder how many 'little' sins we let go. How many times we break a promise and think nothing of it. How often we gossip or say negative things behind people's backs without thinking about it. We don't call those sorts of sins sin nearly as much as we should.

Which brought me right back to the first sermon. And what would it look like in my life to be compelled, gripped and enamored by the Gospel enough to call all sins sin and work on changing them? I know that for me the sin I don't call sin is slothfulness, (or at least laziness), I have not yet subscribed to the Nike 'just do it' quite yet! But I don't want to be a hypocrite and if I'm going to sign a piece of paper asking the Government to not let homosexuals marry, I better be looking at the plank in my own eye at the same time!