Sin is bad. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. The problem is, we don’t always agree on what it is. Some people say that eating pork is a sin. Others say that lying is a sin, even if it is to save someone’s life. Many Christians think that gay marriage is a sin, while many others don’t agree.
What they do all agree about is that sin is bad and needs to be forgiven if we are to be saved, and that we need to stop doing it. Forgiveness is the easy part. “If we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.” 1 John 1:9. All we have to do to be forgiven is to confess. But it’s so easy to fall back into sin again and get stuck in a cycle of sinning and repenting.
What we want is freedom. But how to find it? I would suggest that freedom from sin emerges from internalizing a singular, transformative truth: the beautiful reality of the character of God.
Rooted in Lies
You see, sin is deeply rooted in lies about who God is. To the degree that we drink in the truth—the non-condemning love of God revealed in Jesus Christ—God sets us free. That truth liberates us.
But if we allow to run its course unchecked by the light of the gospel, it leads to a very frightening place. The Apostle Paul described it this way: “Who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Ephesians 4:19, NKJV).
What does it mean to be past feeling? Let’s look at a few different translations of this verse:
“They have lost all sensitivity…” NRSVA
“And they, having become callous…” NASB
“They have no sense of shame.” NLT
This verse is describing a form of psychopathy. Losing the ability to feel empathy for others can lead to some rather shameless behavior! This verse is a warning that sin, if left unchecked, will gradually deaden the heart’s capacity for healing.
The Myth of the Supreme Authority Figure
To understand the remedy for sin, we first need to have a correct understanding of what it is. We generally assume that sin is an arbitrary category of behaviors that God, acting as a supreme authority figure, simply forbids. We think of God’s laws in the same way we think of speed limits: Arbitrary, with enforced punishments—like a list of rules and assume there is no intrinsic problem with the actions themselves. This leads us to believe that the punishments for these sins are arbitrary as well.
But that is a monstrous misrepresentation of the character of God.
Sin isn’t just breaking an arbitrary rule. Paul teaches us that sin is itself intrinsically problematic. The only reason God says no to anything is that it is harmful to us. And that “no” is always in favor of some greater “yes.”
God is fundamentally a God of Yes, not a God of No (see 2 Corinthians 1:19–20). God is the architect of pleasure; He invented it. The Word Eden literally means pleasure. We could say that He created a garden of pleasure! God is all about joy, happiness, and delight. That joy is intrinsically tied to love, righteousness, holiness, and goodness. Those things are in our best interest. They promote physical and psychological flourishing.
Sin, by contrast, is intrinsically against our best interest.
Calibrated for Love Alone
The human mind is calibrated for love and love alone. That is the original design. We were engineered and hardwired for love.
We were only ever supposed to experience loving relationships and kindness. Our mind, heart, and body were never designed to process rage, violence, greed, or lust. Because those things are foreign to the original design, they traumatize us. They hurt and wound us on a deep, profound level. God is not arbitrarily inflicting woundedness as a punishment; it is the sin itself that causes the wounds.
Scripture shows us that love is an eternally expanding principle, meaning there is no limit to how much it can grow. Anyone who has held a child knows that the trajectory of love keeps curving upward exponentially, expanding our capacities forever.
Sin operates exactly the opposite: by the law of diminishing returns. C.S. Lewis put it this way:
“Sin is an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure.”
You feel like you’re getting more, but you are actually becoming less. It feels euphoric for a split second, but in reality, you are bargaining away your sensitivity, your moral perception, and your capacity to give and receive love. You feel like you’re rising higher, but you are actually shrinking and sinking lower.
Wronging Your Own Soul
One of the most insightful texts in all of Scripture is in the book of Proverbs, where God speaks in the form of personified Wisdom:
For whoever finds me finds life, And obtains favor from the Lord; But he who sins against me wrongs his own soul; All those who hate me love death. Proverbs 8:35-36, NKJV.
Being made in the image of God, we were built to function within the very structure and grain of reality. Therefore, to sin against God is to go against the grain of our own existence. We wrong our own soul when we sin—we violate the integrity of our being. This is self-sabotage.
Sin damages us ,intrinsically. It’s no arbitrary sovereignty of God that designed His laws the way He did. God hates sin simply because, in His love for us, He hates what hurts us.
Re-scripting Human Identity
If you perform an action once, it becomes easier to do it again. Every time you repeat it, that conduct incrementally shapes your identity, thought by thought, feeling by feeling. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The Scarlet Letter, “No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” Sin gradually changes us until we identify with the wound itself, and our true identity can no longer be recognized.
But Jesus did not teach us to live by a law of diminishing returns. The gospel brings the highest form of psychological healing. Christ invites us to put off the old, corrupt conduct like a worn-out garment, and to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. This is not just an external change of behavior, but a deep heart transformation.
Christ is working to restore the finely tuned mechanisms of our hearts to the only thing they were ever meant to experience: unconditional love. This will lead us to be more truly human than we ever could be on our own.
This blog post was inspired by a talk Ty Gibson gave at the 2026 Light Bearers Convocation. I would encourage you to check out Light Bearers for more information on this topic.
