Sin, any sin, recognised and repented of properly brings us in humility and dependence to God.
Sin wrongly recognised and repented of will result in efforts to set things right, in ourselves, and more usually in others.
After all, we’re much better at seeing the failings of others.
And when you put a person in a position where their role is to point out the faults in others and tell them to try harder you set a system that will not just fail but actually get worse and worse.
This is why Gospel preaching brings people to a life-changing encounter with God via the realisation that all our lives need changing and we can’t change them.
From Will Willimon:
I’m all for preaching about “peace and justice” or other high-sounding virtues. The. trouble is that those of us doing the talking are also sinners. We can’t speak from some moral pinnacle from which we call attention to the wrongs that less moral people have not noticed. Preaching of this sort backfires by unintentionally flattering our vanity that our benighted attitudes are what’s wrong with the world and that changing what’s wrong begins and ends with us. Moralism is a poor substitute for the death and resurrection of Jesus in the which the triune God is determined to “walk around among you; I will be your God and you will be my people” (Leviticus 26:12). Honest confrontation with the truth about God enables us to tell the truth of ourselves.
Will Willimon, Who Lynched Willie Earle?, Abingdon, 2017, pgs 77-78.
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