March 18 / 19
Sin as Falling Short by Pastor Nathan Schultz

Sin is a loaded word.  For those outside the faith, it’s a funny and dated religious term.  For Christians, we repeat it so often that it loses its bite.  Scripture reveals that sin is worse than we know.  Jesus is so serious about it that He says, “If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.”  What is it about sin that’s so fatal it would require Jesus to go to the cross?  

This Lent we do a soul examination, studying all the ways God describes the complex of sin. Lawlessness, adultery, rebellion . . . The cancerous nature of sin means that we need to go deeper than surface confession.  The problem is worse than we know, which makes our Savior greater than we can imagine.  
Today, we talk of sin as falling short. You have missed the mark, can’t make the grade, and don’t feel you are “good enough”. It was not meant to be this way. God made everything good, and yet so much, ourselves included, is not so good. The answer? A Jesus who stands in our place, and is good to us now, and on the last day. As Christians, we live with a promise: All that is not so good, will become good again.  

Matthew 25:31-46; 1 Corinthians 15:20-28