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Why Sin Matters

by Mark McMinn 

In his article, Why Sin Matters,” McMinn juxtaposes earning god’s love through human effort against surrendering to God’s love, thereby becoming able to receive it through no merit of our own.  Earning is a pattern drilled into us since childhood.  Earning means doing something in order to gain a reward.  Gaining a reward without earning it is a foreign idea in our culture and generally disrespected.  Earning our way means we are responsible and respectable.  Yet God’s love is of a different paradigm.  It is a love I cannot earn.  It is there for me and comes first, before I have earned or deserved anything.   

The contrast between earning God’s love and surrendering to it is highlighted in the parable of the prodigal son.  The elder brother assumes God’s love is earned.  “All these years I’ve worked for you, and yet you never gave me a party that I might celebrate with my friends,” declares the elder son, who feels he deserves better, given all that he has done.   

The second approaches simple surrender.  This is the approach of the younger son, covered in pig grime and clothed in rags, who surrenders and throws himself on the mercy of the Father’s love.  He cannot earn the love he craves, and he knows it.   

It is important to realize that we have no earning potential—no green card in God’s economy.  We are sinful, separated from God not just by what we do each day, but by who we are.  We are intrinsically unable to “measure up.”  God’s grace is a grace given to us who cannot deserve it—not just simply to us who don’t deserve it because we’re somehow not trying hard enough.   

When we fall helpless as the prodigal son, it is all we can do.  It is then we are aware of the incredible depth of God’s love that meets us in this place of surrender.  To focus on sin without grace is to slip into the “earning” mentality.  Still, to focus on grace without an awareness of sin may cause us to see ourselves as essentially “okay,” thereby devaluing grace—making it cheap.  Here we forget the huge difference between us and God and our distorted nature in the light of God’s holy presence.   

“Sin is our only hope,” McMinn quotes Barbara Brown Taylor as saying.  This means that in knowing sin, we open ourselves to a full understanding and appreciation of God’s forgiveness and grace and longing for us in spite of ourselves.   

1. How does our culture promote “earning” and “deserving” over “forgiveness” and “grace”?  How has the church promoted the same thing?   

2. What reaction do you have to McMinn’s thesis that we cannot earn God’s love?  Is this in any way freeing for you?  Does it make you nervous that somehow this might “let people off the hook” too easily?   

3. Do you think that aw awareness of our own incapacity ever to deserve God’s love might do damage to healthy self-esteem?  How might knowledge of our own sin actually fulfill us rather than demean us?   

4. What patterns of earning God’s love are you aware of in your own life?  What ways can you think of to begin to free yourself from these?