We Confess Our Sin
Genesis 1:27 asserts that we've been made in the image of the Creator. Like God we have the capacity to love and care, to communicate, and to create. Like God we're free, and we're responsible. We've been made, says Psalm 8, "a little lower than God" and crowned "with glory and honour." We believe that the entire created order has been designed for the well-being of all its creatures and as a place where all people can dwell in covenant with God.
But we do not live as God intends. Again and again we break the covenant relationship between God and us. We turn our backs on God and on God's expectations for us. We deny our birth right, the life of wholeness and holiness for which we were created. We call this alienation from God, sin.
A distinction should be made between sin and sins. We use the word sins to denote transgressions or immoral acts. We speak of "sins of omission and commission." These are real enough and serious, but they're not the essential issue.
The issue is sin in the singular. Sin is our alienation from God, our wilful act of turning from God as the centre of life and making our own selves and our own wills the centre. From this fundamental sin our various sins spring. Sin is estrangement of at least four kinds:
Separation from God
Sin is breaking the covenant, separating ourselves from the One who is our origin and destiny. It's trying to go it alone, to be out of touch with the God who is the centre of life. Based on the story in Genesis 3, the church has described this break in dramatic terms: the fall.
Separation from other people
In our sin we distance ourselves from others. We put ourselves at the centre of many relationships, exploiting others for our own advantage. Instead of loving people and using things, we love things and use people. When confronted with human need, we may respond with token acts of kindness or with lip service or perhaps not at all. Toward some people and some groups, we're totally indifferent or actively hostile. Sin is a denial of our common humanity and our common destiny on this one small planet.
Separation from the created order
In our sin we separate ourselves from the natural environment. Greedily we turn upon it, consuming it, destroying it, befouling it. As natural resources dwindle, as possibilities increase for long-term damage to the atmosphere and seas, we pause to wonder. But our chief concern is for our own survival, not for the beauty and unity of all God's creation.
Separation from ourselves
We turn even from our own centre, from the goodness, happiness, and holiness that is our divinely created potential. Sometimes it seems that there are two wills warring within us. As Paul put it, "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15).
Paul continues: "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24). Like Paul, we discover that we are powerless to extricate ourselves from sin. Though we work ever so earnestly at various means of saving ourselves—being good, going to church, reading the Bible—these in themselves cannot save us. Sin is not a problem to be solved. It's our radical estrangement from God, a separation that only God can heal by a radical act of love. We yearn for this reunion, this reconciliation, this redemption, this salvation.
