When God Calls It Sin – Part 1 – #3 The Malignancy of Sin

About this Series: “When God Calls It Sin” was originally a 5-week study I had lead in 2019 for an adult Sunday School class at my old church.

The outlines and lessons were based on Jerry Bridges’ book “Respectable Sins,” which I highly recommended for anyone serious about confronting the sins in their own hearts that are often overlooked.

For the blog, I am adapting my own notes and slides from the class and posting them almost verbatim. Since each class was an hour long, however, I will be dividing segments of each lesson into separate posts for easier reading.

Jump To:

• Part 1 (Introduction)
• Part 2 (Ungodliness || Unthankfulness || Anxiety || Frustration || Discontentment)
• Part 3 (Pride || Selfishness || Judgmentalism)
• Part 4 (Anger || Impatience & Irritability || Envy, Jealousy, & Related Sins)
• Part 5 (Sins of the Tongue || Wordliness)

Part 1 Segments:

1. Ordinary Saints
2. The Disappearance of Sin
3. > The Malignancy of Sin
4. The Remedy of Sin
5. The Power of the Holy Spirit / Conclusion

The Malignancy of Sin

Instead of always looking at those sinners outside of the Church, we need to ask ourselves: “What about me? I have never murdered anyone or committed adultery. Just how bad is my own sin?”

Below is a short video in which Paul Washer explains just how wicked our sin truly is before a righteous and holy God.

It is my prayer that the video has helped you to understand your own sin just a little better. And this is why it is so important for us to study, honestly, what the Lord calls sin.

In his book, The Sinfulness of Sin, Ralph Venning uses the following words to describe sin: it is “vile, ugly, odious, malignant, pestilent, pernicious, hideous, spiteful, poisonous, virulent, villainous, and deadly.”

Charles Spurgeon likewise had strong words for sin:

These little sins burrow in the soul and make it so full of that which is hateful to Christ […] A great sin cannot destroy a Christian, but a little sin can make him miserable. […] The sea is made of drops; the rocks are made of grains: and the sea which divides [you] from Christ may be filled with the drops of [your] little sins.

Charles Spurgeon, “Morning by Morning” devotional

Spurgeon is absolutely right. Sin is a cancer. If left untreated, even our “acceptable” sins will begin to fester, grow, and spread. And even though our hearts have been renewed and we’ve been freed from the absolute dominion of sin, even though the Holy Spirit dwells within us, the principle of sin still lurks about, waging war against our souls.

When we fail to recognize that awful reality, we are cultivating the very soil in which our “respectable” or “acceptable” sins can grow and thrive.

But how do we often respond? We tend to judge ourselves by comparing our morality with that of the culture in which we live. We think things like “I’m not as bad as the rest of my family” or “I’m not different from the others in my church.”

And since Christians generally do live life to a higher moral standard than the rest of the world (namely, aiming to live up to God’s standards of morality), it is easy for us to feel good about ourselves. But if we think that God feels the same way, we fail to recognize the truth of the sin that still dwells within us.

Our sin, no matter how small it seems, is an assault on the majesty and sovereign rule of God. It is cosmic treason! To sin is to despise the Word of the Lord, to despise the Lord Himself, and to put ourselves on the throne and declare that we know better than God!

Let us not be like that fish that cannot see how wet it is! Let us examine ourselves and let our sin crush us; let it kill us; let it humble us before the Lord!

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