Last week we determined that everything has a starting point and our faith isn’t an exception. Too often we find ourselves in a faith that doesn’t make us move simply because we haven’t taken the time to find the root of it. When we understand the core of what our faith is, we can more accurately understand the God we are following. Last week we came to the conclusion that our starting point isn’t a statement, it is a question: Who is Jesus? Our whole faith hinges on this question.

However, traditionally, we have been told that the starting point for the Christian faith is an accusation that says, “You’re a sinner.” That makes us squirm a little bit. We have never been comfortable with the word sin.

We have pretty much nixed this word out of our vocabulary, we use much lighter words to describe our lapses in perfection. When kids disobey we don’t tell them that they have sinned. When an employee turns in a report late the manager doesn’t respond with accusations of “sinner!”

As children, we overused the statements, “It’s not my fault,” “It was an accident,” or “I didn’t do it on purpose.” We have this tendency within us to change the language that we use so that we are never the one who is standing at the end of the discipline. We know we aren’t perfect, we know that we have flaws, but we have a hard time recognizing what to call the instances where we fall short.

When we look around at the world, we can see that there is brokenness. There are problems around us that seem unsolvable. There are problems that seem overbearing. There are so many things wrong with the world, just turn on a television, pick up a magazine, or talk to the people around you and you’ll become aware. And so we have to ask: Where am I contributing to the problems of the world? Where am I causing problems around me? What are my errors?

We never want to be the one who is intentionally disobedient, we don’t want to own the lapses in judgment that we make, and so we commonly say that we made a “mistake.” We have this desire within us to not attach ourselves to the brokenness present and so we claim that we made a “mistake.” But how many times have we thought out our next “mistake?” How often do we find ourself premeditating our “mistakes?” What do we call the “mistakes” that happen on a reoccurring basis?

Maybe it is time to own up to our “mistakes” and bring back the word that makes us cringe. There is a benefit when we choose to use the word that makes us uncomfortable, we can accurately understand imperfection more clearly when we call it what it is: sin.