Sin and Love

Sin is Love?!

I know it’s a funny statement.  We think of love as being the opposite of sin.  Yet what is sin?  What would be the opposite of sin?

Ok, I agree that sin and love are opposites.  And yet the problem with the question is the word, “love’.  We have only one word and we use it for everything.  For example, “I love my spouse and kids” “I Love God” “I love ice cream” and “I love my dog” obviously I don’t mean the same thing with each of these statements.  So first off when we think of love let me say there are two broad categories. God’s love and man’s love. 

Many of us think that obedience to God is the antithesis of sin. And it is, but what is the greatest command?

“Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

Matthew 22:37-39 NIV

It is for us to love.  To be obedient we must love.  Not just worldly love but God’s kind of love. And you may ask what does that look like?

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

John 15:12-13 NIV

See also John 3:16

We are to love the world the way God loves the world.  If we did that then there would be no sin in us.  If we put others before ourselves, if we died to ourselves each day then we would not sin.  There is no darkness in God because He is Love.  We being born again continue to live in darkness because we do not live in God’s love.  

You see the devil is a great counterfeiter.  God is love so Satan has a counterfeit love.  It is this love that is the root of sin.  It is the love of self.  Anytime you are sinning it is because at that moment you love yourself more than God.  

Sin is love, it is a counterfeit self-focused love.  It is me sitting on the throne of my life instead of God.  I will be lord over this moment.  I will attempt to satisfy my desire.  What I want, desire, or even tell myself I need is more important.  I am willing to sin against God because I love what I want.  I am willing to hurt people around me because I love myself more than I love them.  

When I make myself lord of my life, I will always hurt someone else.  And at that moment I am saying I don’t care. I don’t care if I hurt you because I am more important than you.  I love “Me” more than I love God. 

It all comes back to, “Love” which kind will you have controlling your life?

There is the love of this world.

“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but the world.”

1 John 2:15-16 NIV

But true love looks totally different.

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.”

1 John 4:7-9 NIV

God’s love is giving and meets the needs of others.  And so we also should live lives.  Giving ourselves, first to God.  And then we should give sacrificially to help meet the needs of others.  We must put others before ourselves.  If I may say, this should start at home and then spread beyond, even to the whole world.  This was the mission that God has called us to.  We His children are to love as He has loved.