In Tim Keller's The Reason for God, I came across the following this morning:
"Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him."
I find this to be a spectacularly simple way of understanding our sin nature and also the pervasiveness of sin in our lives. Self identity is of the greatest value in our culture--everyone is always trying to find themselves or adopt a new/changed identity--and if we find our identity in anything other than our relationship and service to God, we will be inherently unstable.
Later on, Keller (in response to Kierkegaard) talks about sin as the making of good things into ultimate things. So, if I root my identity solely in my occupation as a student or as a wife or anything else (no matter how "good" those things are), I am turning good things into ultimate things. I am locating the significance of my existence outside of where it truly belongs.
phew, heavy stuff!
In other news, I just finished Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Terrific read--the language in particular is incredible.
No man is an Island, entire of it selfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine...
any mans death
diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee. (J. Donne)
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