Sin Really is Real

“In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth — only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion.” — CS Lewis, Mere Christianity
What a prescription for the Church of the 21st century. Certainly from our pulpits and from our evangelism we preach peace, we preach comfort, we preach heaven, we preach goodness and mercy. But this is most certainly not the entire Gospel!

Were I an unbeliever who was newly receiving your message, then I would sharply reply, “Why do I need peace? Show me peace in Iraq and I will believe your peace. Why do I need comfort? I give comfort to myself. Why do I need heaven? I am not yet dying. Why do I need goodness? Mercy? I am already a very good man.”

And what does the Church have to say to this? Simply, “But all have sinned!” True enough. But to me the unbeliever, you might as well say, “Gobbledee-gook, dwit ze bob!” I will forget your name as soon as you leave my doorstep, and I will return to my needs and desires.

Why has the Church become ineffective? Why is our message no longer even effective among the Bretheren? Because we are selling a cure for a disease we don’t believe in. If we seek truth, as Lewis suggests, we will find that we are hopelessly condemned to hell. The Scriptures make this point very clearly. The Gospel, though, is that when we reach that realization, there is redemption to be found — God’s deliverance through Jesus.

Without a true understanding of the disease, the cure means little to us. It is a stumbling block. It gets in the way of our own good plans. But when we become convinced that we are deathly ill, that we have been marked by our Creator as Damned, then we shall fall to the ground in terror, and the message of the Gospel will take our breath away.

Let’s stop seeking comfort for comfort sake. Let’s seek Truth again. Let’s repent — not merely acknowledge sinfulness, but turn drastically from our sinful ways and fall as beggars at the feet of the One who came to save us. Then the Word will ring sweetly in our ears and we will have something to tell others about.