What is the difference between venial and cardinal sins? I’ve always looked at sinning as jumping off of something. From three feet in the air my knees and back will feel it but it’s a big difference between three feet and three miles.

Melina, with differences in our past there is a common thread. Where we following a man made religion to the affect that the rules where fundamentally skewed from his word. I was not allowed to take communion because of the laws of the church which my father belongs to. A disrespectful act at a sunrise service which was me playing the wrong song on the piano labeled me as an apostate. Years later Scott baptized me (I’m still getting water out of my ears) to giving me my first communion.

My resurrection has been a challenge. Moving from one challenge to the next and growing a little each day teaches the impatient me to slow down and soak in his love. Granted I’m still taking baby steps but learning once you have fallen down to get up with fewer complaints and blame is getting better. Is God’s love a policy or law?

Michael
7

Secondly – some context: I was raised in an evangelical church and converted to Catholicism at 20 but am no longer practicing.

Obviously having a varied background I may have a weird understanding of things but could it be as follows:

Is it right to think of sin as anything that separates us from God and if that’s true than is sin different for everyone? Are there no hard and fast rules?

Could it be that as Christians we’ve made the concept of sin way harder than it needed to be?
That we dwell on it too much? Is it that we spend so much time concentrating on not sinning that we fail to do anything else? That our legalism leads to paralysis?

I have to be honest – rules are nice. They make things easier – but there is something in these questions that looks like freedom to me. If we approach sin from the stand point of legalism and we concentrate on avoiding sin there is nothing to answer for. If we get beyond the concept of sin management and follow our conscience and for lack of a better analogy – color outside the lines then we have to take responsibility for our choices.

I believe that confessing sin matters, I believe that sin separates us from God. I believe that we are called to be holy and somehow we have to pursue that. I’m just not certain as to what that looks like – but maybe that’s the point, it looks different for everyone.

As for the resurrection – I’m working on it . I am reading Surprised by Hope and it’s basically blowing my mind but in a really good way. If you would have told me 3 years ago when I decided I was done with church that I would be starting this journey again I would have laughed at you – but here I am. So I guess that’s my resurrection.

First – I think sin does matter. I think we should not discount the ability of unconfessed sin to create distance in our relationship with God. Yet, I am trying to reflect on what the way out is here.
Second, “should the Christian no longer be concerned with sin?” Not hardly. We should pursue righteousness and holiness. However, our primary focus must not be “avoiding” or “managing” sin in our lives.
Third, I think you raise the questions i am trying to get at with the Willard quote here. Is our concept of sin out of whack? how do we address sin in our lives? What do we do when we see sin easily, but resurrection is harder to discern?

i think that we need to wrestle with how we define sin. I think we need to figure out a way to motivate ourselves to pursue Christ-centered living without falling into guilt and fear as our motivators. And I think the very fact that we struggle to unpack the resurrection is our current question at crash – shouldn’t we be wrestling with resurrection and searching to understand it? Why is it that sin is so clear to us, yet the first fruits of the resolution (resurrection) is not?
Keep wrestling with resurrection because I think the more we wrestle here, the more we will find that the resurrection is playing out in our lives in places we do not expect or see initially.
I described my friends in the blog “Implementing the Resurrection”- friends that I see the resurrection in – because i think we often see it most clearly in the lives of others. Your own emergence from your past experiences and your struggle here is a sign for me that the Resurrection is at work in you.
Ultimately, I think God meets us in our struggle and as allow others to walk with us, we find ourselves moving forward even it is slow and difficult movement.
Thanks for your honesty and presence here.

The first methodology is call “5M” and the second is referred to as the “5W”. Within the 5M all mistakes in manufacturing is 1) Method 2) Machinery 3) Material 4) Manpower 5) Management. Within the 5W system you have 1) Who 2) What 3) When 4) Where 5) Why, Why, and Why (we are taught to ask the why five times to confirm that answer is the same each time.

So if I can put a man on the moon and never made the same mistake twice why can the church learn from my business and fix humanity with something similar? I would think with all the intelligence setting in your pews someone would Brain Storm, Mind Map, and create a Continuous Improvement Plan using something similar to 5M and 5W.

Now before all of you get your waffle bats and wait for me out in the parking lot let me tell you lesson learned over the last 30 years of living in a world of tight rules and regulations. OWNERSHIP!!! If you have ownership in Christ raise your hands and for those who are setting on your hands don’t try…I doubt very much if you cared anyway.

Michael
7

P.S.: A Christian is verbs of continuous action…take away the action and you will have a dead church.