More Than Just Avoiding Sin

13 June 2025   Matthew 5:27-32

“If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell.” Matthew 5:29​

The word for “sin” in the New Testament means “to miss the mark,” “to fail to hit the bullseye.” Jesus’ teaching is that whatever causes you to fail to hit the bullseye needs to be eliminated from your life. Right. Of course.

It isn’t enough simply to avoid the things that are intrinsically evil – it is pretty clear that things like killing, pornography, drug trafficking and other obvious evils (obvious to minds that are not warped and diseased at any rate) have no place in the Christian life. Other things are not intrinsically evil, but they can be used in evil ways. Beer, certain friendships, some TV shows, movies or YouTube videos may not be evil in themselves, but if they are used for evil purposes, they have to go too. Just so.

So moral righteousness is achieved largely by subtraction. Everybody knows this. It is the most plain meaning of common expressions like, “Knock it off!”

But that isn’t all there is to it. Sure, you can fail to hit the bullseye by aiming at the wrong thing, or by not aiming at all. You can also fail to hit the bullseye by aiming at the right thing and simply falling short -- like the archer who doesn’t, or can’t, bend the bow quite far enough, like the marksman who knows you have to fire between heartbeats to make the long shot, but isn’t alert enough to feel his heart’s rhythm. In cases like that, you avoid sin not by subtracting, but by adding something – more strength, more awareness. Anyone who is serious about making progress in the moral life therefore has to become stronger by acts of study and learning habits of awareness. Often that means a period of apprenticeship with people who are masters, who have learned the moral life, and can teach it.

But that isn’t all there is to it, either. The moral landscape is complicated – there are a lot of targets out there, and are often pretty close together. How does something get to be a target? What makes moral objectives moral in the first place? It is a commonplace of moral teaching to say, “You should strive for this, and not that,” “You need to aim at this before that.” But where does the order of precedence come from? It doesn’t come from the targets, but from the story we tell about the targets. In other words, only people educated and trained in a particular way have any notion of what a target is, and why to bother shooting at it in the first place.

All this is to say that one of the causes of sin is not telling the right story, or not telling the right story often enough, or loudly enough, or skillfully enough. Churches that don’t offer enough opportunities for study of scripture and times of prayer can be causes of sin. Parents who say lame and brainless things like, “I will let my children decide for themselves about ultimate things when they are old enough,” and provide no instruction on what ultimate things are, or why they matter, are causes of sin.

Failing to hit the bullseye has consequences that are more than just aesthetic. Missing the mark doesn’t just make lives that are unattractive. It makes lives that are dead, and deadly. The New Testament is a little more blunt: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). The task of every serious believer and every serious Church, therefore, is obviously to subtracteverything that is intrinsically evil, and also to add daily, continuously the story of Jesus that tells us what the ultimate things are, and why they matter, and the way there:

“And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall speak of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as emblems between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on the gates of your cities.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9).