The following article by Frank Powell gives us a lot to think about:
9 Sins the Church Is Surprisingly OK With as Long as You Love Jesus
What if the big sins, you know the ones you try hardest to avoid, aren’t the greatest threat?
I was in an engineering class the first time I watched the tragic explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Even though I wasn’t alive when it happened, I caught a glimpse of the horror thousands must have felt as the events unfolded.
And, the first question everyone wanted to know was, “What happened?”
After months of investigation, here’s what the Rogers Commission (the group commissioned to investigate the explosion) discovered: An o-ring seal in the right solid rocket booster failed at take-off. I won’t bore you with the details, but an o-ring is a small device relative to the size of a space shuttle. Very small.
It wasn’t something huge, like a puncture in the rocket booster or a hole in the cabin, that caused this disaster. It was a small, seemingly insignificant, o-ring failure.
I think there’s a lesson here for the church. What if the big sins, you know the ones you try hardest to avoid, aren’t the greatest threat to your joy and the church’s mission?
Maybe it’s the sins lying underneath, the ones considered normal or acceptable, the ones going undetected, that are affecting the church the most. I want to address nine of these sins.
Continue reading here.
Christ Alone Wyoming 
That is a good article. I think many professing Christians are apathetic about the Word and the Lord, too concerned with comfort and political circumstances. I think the older one gets the less those temporal things matter but the more important they can seem to be. We must walk humbly before the Lord our God and always be on guard lest we drift away from what we’ve been taught from His Scriptures.
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Johnathon Edwards wrote that narcissism is the root of all hypocrisy. I found a review of his work by Bruce W. Davidson at CRS. The following is a cut and paste snippet from this well written piece.
On the basis of their inclinations, hypocrites tend to fashion for themselves a customized deity that suits them. Ideas unattractive to them, such as divine wrath and absolute sovereignty, might fall victim to a theological reworking.28 An imaginary god more attractive to their prejudices then becomes the object of their worship and affection, “so having formed in their minds such a God as suits them, and thinking God to be such a one as themselves, who favors and agrees with them, they may like him very well.”29 In contrast, authentic believers embrace every attribute of God’s revealed nature, including facets that others find unpalatable. In fact, Edwards did not consider the significantly heterodox even to be candidates for acceptance as genuine believers.
Today while we do not worship idols fashioned by our hands we now, in our vain imaginings, fashion a god to our liking who winks at our “little sins” and never requires repentance from them.
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Good questions, Finnegan. I will see if somebody would like to comment before I do. Hopefully, when I get back from work this evening. Have a blessed day.
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@ Finnegan:
That was the whole point of the article. Your average church (i.e. collection of professing believers gathering in an expensive church building) will rail against adultery during the sermon, then go out to a gluttonous lunch afterward.
Furthermore, if you notice, in the title I put “little sins” inside quotation marks. I think everyone else who’s commented so far got the point.
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@ Finnegan
I like your lion/mosquito analogy and I agree with what you’re saying. What I think you’re missing though, is that the original author of this post is saying that sin is still sin (as you’ve aptly pointed out) but we tend to ignore some sins that we shouldn’t.
I do not believe the author of the article (who was not me, but a man named Frank Powell) was suggesting what you’re saying he is (e.g. the Romanist view of sin). He was merely pointing out that we Westerners tend to ascribe levels of severity to sin (whether we’re right in doing it or not). And thus, we tend to dismiss some sins (like the ones he listed) while we rail against other sins (see how we rail against homosexuality but are often silent on premarital sex).
That was the point of the article and that was why I posted it and included my quotations around “little sins.”
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In all this discussion of “big sin vs little sin”, has anyone else noticed that he lists some things as sins that aren’t sins?
He explicitly calls fear a sin, being comfortable a sin, and even people thinking highly of you a sin. He also explicitly explicitly says that coming to Christ out of a fear of going to Hell is a sin.
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