A Reflection on Sin

by Rachel Jones, Sophmore at ETHS

Psalm 51

At the ripe old age of sixteen, I am completely willing to acknowledge my confusion with various aspects of religion, the Presbyterian Church, and God. While there have been great stretches of time where I’ve attended church religiously, there have also been times when I’ve been so frustrated and confused that I figured there were better things that I could do with my Sunday mornings. I’m at this age right now where I’m supposed to be questioning everything I’ve been raised to think so that I can figure out my own beliefs, and very few ideas have stayed completely concrete. There is, however, one thing that I have remained confident on. I don’t care how old you are, what you do for a living, or anything, because no matter how different we might seem, you and I have something in common: in God’s eyes, we’re sinners.

“Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” (Psalm 51:5) David himself said in this passage that from birth until death, we’re always sinning, because no matter how much we try to do good things in the world, we’re still constantly disappointing God. I think this is a really interesting part of our beliefs, and also a super important one, because despite the fact that we’ve done all of this really horrible stuff—no matter how minor or major—God loves us anyway and has already forgiven us. Even though He could have some extensive list of things for us to do before we can truly be forgiven, all that God wants is for us to love Him, to tell others about Him, and how much He’s done in our lives.

Of all of the various beliefs and ideals that I’ve encountered having to do with Christianity, this is probably the first one that I really became comfortable with. I still see evidence of it every day—in the jealous look that I see a girl giving someone else who’s dating the boy she’s interested in, or in the sarcastic, rude remark about some crazy girl that leaves my friend’s mouth before he realizes that he was even thinking it. God’s forgiveness for simple things like that, and for much more substantial things, has never even crossed my mind as something to question.

But as much as I feel that this is an admirable part of our religion—having faith that God is going to forgive us for all of the bad things that we do—I feel like it also can be construed as somewhat of a cop-out. Some might say “Oh, God’s forgiven me, I can do whatever I want to and it won’t matter.” And I think it’s very important that people not forget that while we are sinners just by being, it doesn’t mean we can go about life not caring about our sins; I’ve seen far too many kids, even grown-ups, acting like it means exactly that.