Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

• Romans 14:23b

If the title rings a bell, I recently published a post on Another Old Song – Blizzard of Lies.  This is my third installment in this little miniseries.

Okay, when you cross the line into sin, that is not a gray area, you have sinned.

I read a chapter in a book by Billy Graham on the Scripture above.  Note that it is only the second half of the last verse of Romans 14.  Yet, Billy Graham points out that if our chief end is to enjoy and glorify God in everything that we do, then indeed, anything that is not part of faith in God is sin.

But enjoying a baseball game is sin?  Listening to music other than Christian music is a sin?  Okay, there can be a lot of sin involved.  Yelling at the umpire because the close call was against your team is calling someone a fool or worse.  It is idol worship of your team, especially when it caused you to become angry.  And as for the sin of listening to music, I tried to communicate to the boys that they needed to understand the lyrics, and if the lyrics glorified sin in any way, do not listen to it.  My boys heard, “Blah, blah, blah. Dad hates rock ‘n roll.”

But when we were in a church Bible study one time, before my wife made a commitment to Christ, she made an excuse for something that I said, “He’s very Black and White.”

This comment had nothing to do with skin color.  I did not like thinking of anything as gray when it came to sin.

But remember my description of my mother.  She lived all of her life within three hours of her place of birth, except when my Dad was called onto active duty during the Korean Conflict and she thought that Columbia, SC was the nether regions of hell itself because it was not exactly like her hometown.

Thus, to my mother, everything that was not exactly like her misguided notion of our hometown was sin.  Oddly, this let some true sins go unpunished, but there were ten thousand non-biblical commandments that she labeled as sin.

Thus, honoring my parents and not seeing her ideas as being fallacious, I crossed over that weirdness barrier because my mother said that was sin, and my wife had to apologize on my behalf.

Tim Hawkins has a comedy routine about Christian Cuss Words.  Whether you think it to be appropriate or not, my mother had said in her lifetime that about a third of those terms were indeed cursewords.  She would rank the entire list as not being “yes or no,” thus sin.

But to be honest, when my wife and I first heard the routine, we started calling drivers who cut us off in traffic “Chat Wagons.”  She did not mind if I used “fartknocker” on occasion.

But near the end of her life, she said that both of us say “crap” and we both know what word we are thinking, and we should both stop doing that.  I think she was getting to the point where she knew the end was coming.  She knew that there really is no gray area.  Outside the white, all is black.

But as we live in a fallen world, we cannot build a glass bubble around ourselves.  And if we ever became guilty of no sin at all for an hour or two, we would become so proud of ourselves that God might have to turn His gaze away from us.  If we remained sinless for a couple of hours, God did that, not us.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.