LIE: The goal in life is to be sinless

Lie: The goal in life is to be sinless.
Truth: Sinlessness makes a poor and frustrating goal. Love is the goal in life.

Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Yes, we should avoid sin and we should be diligent to “make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” We should also know our weaknesses and shore them up, and make investments in their corresponding strengths.

That said, why is this a lie? What’s wrong with trying to be sinless? Several things:

1  It focuses our attention on the self. It’s impossible to not be aware of ourselves and to some degree we should be. But focusing on our sins — trying to avoid them, agonizing over them, is counterproductive. This only serves to focus our attention on our lives to the exclusion of others.

2  It makes us legalists. The Pharisees, who were so focused on staying pure, created a compendium of 613 laws with the intent to make sin undoable. But the unforeseen consequence of this assiduous attention turned life into a legalistic drudgery, which in turn, created other consequences: pride, neglect of the heart, focusing almost exclusively on outward conformity, and a heavy-handed bureaucracy to keep everyone in line.

3  It makes us unloving. To the degree that we focus on ridding ourselves of our besetting sins, we forfeit our capacity to love. Jesus gave us a new commandment:

“. . . that you love each other as I have loved you.” “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

Asked by a lawyer for the greatest commandment, Jesus, without hesitation, quoted Deuteronomy:

Jesus said to him, ‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets. — Matthew 20:37–40

Jesus made it clear that the goal is to love: God Himself, then others. If we practice these two, everything else falls into place. But without a diligent pursuit of love, we have no foundation, no substance to put into our lives. Without love, we become empty shells with nothing to live for.

But when we choose to love people, to get involved in their lives, something else happens — we set ourselves up to be hurt in a variety of ways. When we choose to really care and work for someone else’s good, when we show compassion on them, we also become vulnerable. How so? Let me count the ways: What if they don’t accept or appreciate our care? What if the care you show requires you to identify with someone who is misunderstood or has been rejected by society? What if the care you show requires you to serve in a hidden way, where someone else gets the credit, or in a work that is demeaned or unappreciated? I could go on but you get the picture. All true love, the divine kind of love, includes risk and a sacrifice of self.

Peter, in his first letter, made a peculiar-sounding statement, at least to our modern ears:

Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind, for he who has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, that he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. — I Peter 4:1–2 [emphasis mine]

John makes a similar statement:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever. — I John 2:15-17

When we focus on positively doing the will of God, which is characterized and motivated by love, our life is transformed. And when we choose to love the hurting, the needy, the outcast, the ‘sinner’ as Jesus did, we will suffer. At that point, life comes into the right perspective; we take on the mind of Christ and sin becomes stupid, ridiculous, and loses its appeal, but only because something else has captivated us: God and His glorious desires:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. — John 3:16

This same love takes over our lives and consequently, by degrees, we lose our sinfulness.

See the introduction to this category: Lies about sin.