sin is walking away from God instead of into his way of loving

​I think sometimes the idea of Christianity can become challenging because we start believing God wants us to be perfect people instead of people who have a perfect love. When we think God wants us to be perfect people we start focusing on perfect choices and behaviors. When we focus on how perfectly God wants us to love, we start focusing on - well - God.

I have two boys. There are some basic rules in place for them. But I hope the rules are all in place to help them live within a framework that points them in the direction of perfectly loving other people. There isn't a scorecard on the refrigerator tracking how many rules they've followed or broken, but in every interaction with them I'm taking note of how much closer they are to perfectly loving the people around them.

We all know the story of the original sin. Eve ate from the tree God told her and Adam not to eat from. I find it interesting that the first words God spoke to them after they made the wrong "choice" was - "where are you?"

Clearly God knew where they were. He's God. Why ask that?

I think maybe it was God's way of saying, why did you leave me? We had this good thing going - we thought alike - our hearts were in perfect alignment, then you walked away from me.

God knows that if we are ever going to love perfectly, we have to have our hearts and souls and minds in perfect alignment with him. Sin isn't making a wrong choice, sin is walking out of alignment with God instead of perfectly into his way of loving.

God doesn't think about choices. God just instinctively loves. It's who he is. Even when we are making the wrong choices, God's instinct is to love us. And even when we're treating someone hateful, the people on the other end of our hate are being instinctively loved by God in spite of us.

God knows we think our way out of loving too many people. We analyze love, determine who is in and who is out. God wants us to so deeply know him and mold our hearts and souls and minds so perfectly after his that we don't have to think about love - we simply and automatically do it.

Love our enemies sounds like a daunting task some days. That's because we think about what our enemies have done, we process the kind of people they are. God skips all the thinking and goes right to loving.

I think if there is a sin scale, on the zero end of that scale is someone who has to spend a lot of time thinking about this whole idea of love before offering it - if they ever do.

Then there's the perfect 10 - there's the person that love pours wildly out of before they have a chance to think about it at all. Because that's God. God is love minus any hurdles or obstacles or dams.

The obstacles that are on our own personal scale that stand between our own way of thinking about life and our personal capacity to instinctively love everyone in it like God does, that is sin.

The remedy to our sin isn't willing ourselves to make a better choice next time. The remedy is allowing into our hearts, on an intimate level, the idea that God loves me in spite of my choices, and let that intimately shape the way I strive to love others.

There is no way any of us will ever be a perfect 10 on that scale. But there is always a right direction to be pointed on it. It's away from what we think about love and toward the way God does it without thinking at all.