How We Take Pride in Our Sin

I’ve always found it sort of trite, the moment when someone tells you their story, filled with bad decision after bad decision, riddled with tons of errors in judgment, followed by the inevitable statement: But, I wouldn’t change a thing. Everything I’ve gone through has made me the person I am today. 

We’ve all heard it.  Most of us have said it.  And, I get the thinking behind it.  We look around at our current life.  We see that, yes, we made it.  We’re smarter now than we were then.  We have gained lots of blessings, some of which seem like the direct result of some big mistake we made in our past.  And, so, we reach for that obvious conclusion:  BECAUSE I did that dumb thing, I received this wonderful blessing.

But, that is faulty reasoning, if you’re a Christian.  Because the mistakes that we’re looking back on?  Most often they are more than just innocent errors in judgment.  Those mistakes are sin.  We’re actually looking on sinful disobedience from our past, and we’re glorifying it.  We’re declaring that our sins were okay because they set us on a course for getting a big blessing.

And, our sins MAY HAVE set us on a course for a big blessing.  But, not BECAUSE of our sin.  There’s is only one reason that we are ever blessed in the midst of our sinfulness.  And that is because God has mercy on us.  He accomplishes His will in our lives despite our mess ups.  And, He blesses and blesses even though we don’t deserve it.

So, when we are telling our stories, we should be filled with humility.  It’s okay for us to acknowledge the incredible blessing that came from a bad situation.  But, let’s not try to turn our sins into something to be celebrated.  We can and should celebrate the victory we have over those past sins, thanks to the blood of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of God.  But, with hearts respectful of the Father who blessed despite our disobedience, let’s acknowledge that while we wouldn’t change the blessing for the whole big beautiful world, we sure would change the disobedience that plagued our past.

And then we humbly turn our hearts toward God to help us keep from stumbling today.