Foundations of Practice · The Conjure Compass Institute
Have We Reduced God to Sin Management?
Christianity says Jesus handled sin.
Died for it. Rose with victory over it. Offered forgiveness for it. Sent his followers forward after it.
Yet somehow, two thousand years later, sin still seems to be the main thing many Christians know how to talk about.
Believe. Repent. Behave. Fail. Repent again. Tell somebody else to believe, after you repent for your own sins of course. Then try to get to heaven, being sin free.
Meanwhile, the Gospels do not end with Jesus seating everybody in the audience and telling them to spend the rest of their lives monitoring themselves for violations.
He sends them.
Matthew gives us the language of keys, binding and loosing, authority, teaching, going, and doing. The larger biblical story is filled with wisdom, discernment, healing, creation, stewardship, spiritual gifts, power, service, and transformation.
So I have a question.
If we believe Jesus dealt decisively with sin, why has sin remained the organizing principle of so much Christian formation?
Why are we better trained to identify what is wrong with a human being than to investigate what a redeemed human being is capable of?
Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Read that passage slowly. Yes, open your Bible.
It does not hand the stone to a better-qualified person. It empties the field. The one person who satisfies his own condition does not throw it either.
So before we turn this story into permission to become better judges, perhaps we should ask what the only qualified person in the story actually did with his qualification.
Keep reading to verse ten. Religion keeps asking what you did. Jesus asks her where her accusers went, refuses to condemn her, and then tells her what to do next.
Go.
The crowd wanted the stone.
Jesus gave her a future.
And if the person Christian theology identifies as uniquely qualified to condemn her chooses instead to send her forward, why have we built religious systems that keep people permanently standing at the scene of what they did?
At what point do we let people go?
WHAT IS SIN?
But before we can answer that, there is another problem. We keep telling people to sin no more as though the word sin requires no investigation.
What exactly are we telling them not to do?
What is sin?
Where is it defined?
And then the more uncomfortable one:
Who gets to define it in another person's life?
Who determines the difference between pride and confidence, greed and provision, wrath and righteous anger, lust and healthy desire, envy and inspiration, gluttony and enjoyment, or sloth and necessary rest?
We use the word as though everybody agrees about what it means. Moral failure. Disobedience. Corruption. Missing the mark.
But where exactly is the boundary?
Who can see it?
Who can measure it?
And how much of what we call sin came directly from Scripture, how much came from later Christian theology, and how much came from the moral expectations of the communities that raised us?
Take the familiar Seven Deadly Sins. People sometimes speak of them as though God wrote this list himself: pride, greed, wrath, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth.
He did not.
They are a later Christian framework for organizing patterns of vice. Scripture certainly addresses the behaviors and conditions those categories attempt to describe, but the familiar list itself has a history.
That matters.
Because once human beings create a category to help us think about morality, there is always a danger that we forget it is a framework and begin using ourselves as the measuring instrument.
And once we are the measuring instrument, other people start building things on top of our measurements.
Have you looked at the justice system that thrives off these labels of sin? The hospitals that make a fortune off these sins?
Hold that question. It comes back.
Because human beings can evaluate behavior and harm without pretending they possess God's access to another person's heart — and some of these things are extraordinarily difficult to measure from outside another person's heart.
So before you call something sin, show me the boundary. Show me where Scripture puts it. Show me what evidence tells you the person crossed it. Show me how you distinguished behavior from motive. Show me how you accounted for context.
And then tell me the most important thing.
Who gave you the authority to make that judgment for somebody else?
PRIDE
Scripture warns repeatedly about pride and haughtiness.
Fine.
Show me the measuring stick.
A man was once homeless. He survives it, builds a business, buys a beautiful house, stands in front of it and says:
Look what I built.
Is that pride? Or gratitude? Or testimony? Or the psychological restoration of someone who spent years believing he would never have anything?
Another person owns the exact same house and uses it to establish protection and survival for those around him.
The visible object is identical.
The posture of the heart is not.
Where is the sin?
Maybe pride cannot finally be diagnosed by the size of somebody's celebration, house, platform, title, or bank account.
God has access to a piece of evidence the rest of us do not. The heart.
The field emptied back at the beginning of this essay.
So who is left standing to locate that boundary in somebody else's heart?
GREED
Scripture warns against covetousness and the love of money.
But consider a single mother working extra shifts because she wants six months of expenses saved. She wants more money.
Is that greed?
What if the person beside her also wants more money because nothing is ever enough?
Same behavior. Different interior conditions.
People fight battles every day that the people watching them know nothing about.
One person's accumulation may be fear. Another's may be preparation. Another's may be stewardship. Another's may indeed be greed.
Who can tell merely by looking at the amount?
That sounds increasingly like a God-sized judgment.
WRATH
I almost thought wrath would be easier.
Then Scripture complicated that too.
Ephesians can say: Be ye angry, and sin not.
So apparently anger itself and sinful anger cannot simply be treated as synonyms.
Scripture contains prophetic anger, divine wrath, protest against injustice, and human rage that becomes destructive.
Then the question becomes: when does justified anger become destructive wrath?
How much anger is someone allowed after betrayal? Abuse? Oppression? Loss? Injustice?
Who gets to stand outside another person's experience and determine the precise quantity of anger their wound permits?
We never actually answered that question. We built an institution instead. We did not resolve where righteous anger ends and destructive wrath begins — we constructed a system that houses people on the far side of the line and bills the public for the beds.
That doesn't mean anger can never become destructive.
It means diagnosis requires more discernment than saying:
Anger = sin.
LUST
Then there is lust.
Jesus' teaching in Matthew 5 makes the interior life matter, not merely outward sexual behavior.
But that creates another question.
Where is the line between sexual desire and lust?
Human beings have bodies. Single people have sexual desire. Married people have sexual desire. Attraction exists before somebody becomes your spouse.
So what exactly transforms desire into objectification, coveting, exploitation, obsession, or whatever we mean when we call it lust?
Who has measured healthy desire?
And why have religious communities sometimes treated the existence of sexual desire itself as evidence that something is spiritually wrong with the person experiencing it?
Again:
Who told us where the line was?
ENVY
Envy may seem easier, because we have watched unhealthy comparison destroy people.
But even here we need discernment.
You see somebody doing something you never knew was possible. Their life shows you another option.
You think: I want that too.
Is that envy? Or inspiration?
Someone raised in an environment where nobody owned a business may need to see somebody else's business before imagining one.
Someone who has never experienced a healthy marriage may need to witness one before realizing what they have been accepting is not normal.
Someone who has never seen wealth handled responsibly may need an example.
Another person's life can become information.
So the question isn't merely: do you want something you saw somebody else have?
The question is what happens inside you because they have it.
Does their flourishing expand your imagination?
Or does their flourishing make you want them diminished?
Those are not the same condition.
GLUTTONY
And then we arrive at one of Christianity's strangest selective anxieties.
We live inside a culture of extraordinary consumption.
Food. Products. Land. Energy. Attention. Entertainment.
Storage units filled with things we forgot we owned. Closets overflowing. Food discarded while people go hungry.
And yet gluttony rarely receives the obsessive attention that some religious communities give sexual behavior.
Why?
If excess is spiritually dangerous, why are some forms of excess culturally invisible?
Where are the altar calls?
Where are the deliverance services?
Where are the accusations that somebody's overconsumption opened a spiritual door?
I am not suggesting that overeating means somebody needs an exorcism.
Now go back to the question I asked you to hold.
Because there is an answer available, and it is not a theological one. Our culture has built enormous economies around consumption itself — selling the excess, and then selling remedies for some of its consequences.
Once there is money in the diagnosis, the pulpit goes quiet.
That does not make illness a sin, and it does not make every form of consumption gluttony.
But it does mean our theology can become incredibly supernatural when discussing somebody else's sin, and remarkably sociological when discussing one our culture profits from.
Who decided which sins deserve public surveillance?
And who decided which ones deserve a payment plan?
SLOTH
And finally, sloth.
This one becomes especially interesting, because modern society has made productivity into a measure of character.
How much should a human being produce?
Who provided that context?
Because it was not Scripture. Proverbs praises diligence. That does not automatically mean capitalism gets to define diligence.
Bodies differ. Minds differ. Disabilities exist mentally and physically, known and unknown. Seasons differ. Caregiving changes capacity. Grief changes capacity. Neurodivergence changes how work happens.
And there is an entire apparatus built to deny that this is true — because output as a measure of worth is not a doctrine, it is an economy, and somebody has to be disqualified for it to work.
Even modern systems such as Human Design challenge the assumption that every person should sustain identical levels and styles of output. Whether one accepts that system's metaphysical claims or not, the question it raises remains useful.
Why did we decide that everybody owes the world the same kind of productivity?
Rest is biblical. Sabbath is biblical. Waiting is biblical. Withdrawal is biblical.
There is a difference between refusing responsibility and possessing a body that requires another rhythm.
So again:
Who gets to diagnose sloth from the outside?
BY THEIR FRUITS
There is one verse that gets handed out as the universal permission slip.
By their fruits you shall know them.
We quote it as though Jesus issued every believer a license to inspect every other believer.
But go read Matthew 7. He is specifically warning about false prophets.
That is a test for people claiming spiritual authority over others.
So now I have another question.
Are we applying to everybody a test Jesus gives there for people claiming to speak for God?
Because if that verse was calibrated for prophets, then the church took an instrument designed to examine the people at the front of the room and turned it on the people in the seats.
Which is precisely backward.
Makes you wonder why prophets are held to a higher standard.
This does not mean sin does not exist. It means human beings may be much worse at diagnosing another person's interior condition than religious confidence suggests.
Scripture itself repeatedly makes the heart significant.
And if God sees what human beings cannot see, perhaps some judgments were never ours to make with the certainty we have claimed.
That does not eliminate accountability. It makes accountability more careful.
We can evaluate harm. We can establish boundaries. We can confront exploitation. We can protect communities.
What we cannot do is claim to know the posture of another person's heart before God.
WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU HAD TO BE CLEAN FIRST?
Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple.
Show me the passage where he repents for his anger afterward.
There isn't one.
So apparently visible anger — even disruptive, property-flipping anger — is not sufficient evidence by itself that somebody has sinned.
Now go back to wrath and try to draw the boundary again.
And notice what he was actually confronting. He did not reject God. He confronted what people had built around access to God.
The ten percent to be a member. The standing required to reach the storehouse when you are in need.
I think Jesus would flip the table in the church.
Because religion teaches people: fix yourself, get clean, give, then approach.
Stop struggling. Trust God. Just pray. Become worthy. Then ask.
But the entire time, God is telling you to speak, to have dominion — and you cannot hear him, because other people are too loud.
And by the time you have made yourself worthy enough to ask, your lights are off, the baby is starving, and your confidence is so low you no longer believe in what you prayed for.
That is what a purity requirement can cost.
Livelihood. Stability. Mental well-being. Spiritual confidence.
WHAT IS THIS PERSON TRYING TO SURVIVE?
It makes me wonder whether we have spent too much time asking what sin has this person committed and not nearly enough asking what conditions is this person trying to survive.
Could what we identify as sinful behavior sometimes be intensified by scarcity, fear, instability, isolation, exhaustion, or an environment that keeps a person trapped in the same cycle?
Think about Maslow's familiar hierarchy of needs — not as biblical doctrine, but as another question to bring to the investigation.
Air, food, water, shelter, sleep.
Then safety. Stability. Protection from danger.
Then love. Belonging. Somebody who claims you.
Then respect, recognition, a name people say with regard.
And only after all of that — becoming who you actually are.
Those are the basic conditions from which human beings attempt to function.
What happens to moral decision-making when those needs remain chronically unmet?
What does desperation do to behavior?
What does instability do to judgment?
What does prolonged rejection do to the need for acceptance?
What does poverty do to choices?
What does exhaustion do to discipline?
And if we address only the behavior while leaving the condition that continually produces it untouched, have we actually restored the person — or merely demanded better behavior from someone who is still drowning?
Because look at how people approach Jesus while something is still wrong.
Sick. Bleeding. Possessed. Ashamed. Confused. Desperate. Socially unacceptable. Morally complicated.
They do not consistently get cleaned up before they encounter power.
Sometimes the encounter is what begins the restoration.
And that makes me notice another pattern. Sometimes the met need is what changes the person's posture.
A woman whose bleeding makes her unclean under Levitical law reaches through the crowd and touches him anyway.
Read that again. A woman disqualified by law touched the hem of the garment of the Divine and got an entire new identity to walk in. She reaches him carrying a condition that had isolated her for twelve years.
Jesus does not begin by asking whether she satisfied a purity requirement.
He calls her Daughter.
Was she not operating in her own authority for healing? For restoration?
What happens to our theology of access if the encounter comes first, and the restoration follows?
AND THEN THE NEW TESTAMENT CALLS YOU THE TEMPLE
We read about Pharisees and Sadducees as though they are characters from a religious world that disappeared two thousand years ago.
But what if the warning was structural?
What happens when preserving the system becomes more important than recognizing what God is doing?
What happens when the rules surrounding sacred things become more sacred than the people they were supposed to serve?
What happens when somebody encounters God outside the approved structure?
Do we recognize God?
Or do we defend the structure?
And then the New Testament turns around and calls you the temple.
Now the investigation gets uncomfortable.
Because if the sacred place has moved inward, I have to ask:
Is my heart actually in God — or have I fallen in love with the ring people built around God?
And if the sacred place moved inward, then so did the measuring.
Jeremiah had already imagined something extraordinary:
I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.
And then:
They shall teach no more every man his neighbour… saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me.
First John goes even further:
The anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you.
I am aware of what that verse does to me, standing here writing this.
Take it as the terms I am offering you. Test this too.
Because the sacred place did not merely move inward. The measuring did too.
Which means nobody outside of you can do it for you.
YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE THIS
Do not surrender your conscience to another person's definition of sin.
Investigate it.
Test it against Scripture.
Examine its fruit.
Examine your motive.
Examine the harm.
Examine your heart before God.
And then take responsibility for what you choose.
You cannot outsource the work of discernment.
That is the answer to the question I opened with. Not that the boundary does not exist. Not that nothing is sin.
But that the person who was always supposed to be doing this work on you — is you.
AFTER SIN, THEN WHAT?
If Christ really redeemed you, what does a redeemed human being actually know how to do?
Because that is the question religion has left unanswered for too many people.
If the Christian story says Jesus dealt with sin, why have we built so much religious machinery around continually making people prove they are clean enough to approach the One who supposedly dealt with it?
Did Jesus die so that we could become better inspectors of everybody else's sin?
Or did something about humanity's relationship with God actually change?
And if it changed — why does so much Christian life still revolve around collecting on a debt we say Christ already addressed?
Why are we still standing at the door, handing out the very mindset somebody died delivering us from?
Would the church have more value if it taught what redemption looked like, instead of teaching that it was only ever a promise?
Where is the transformation, and how do I get there?
And do not tell me to submit, when he said go, and subdue the earth, and do greater works. If you adopt the Pauline letters, then we should be teaching people how to operate in the gifts God gave them.
Or is that too much power for an institution that can no longer control it?
Where is wisdom? Where is discernment? Where is authority? Where is healing?
Where is the power to cultivate, build, govern, create, restore, speak, and become?
Because the biblical story contains far more than people trying not to sin.
God speaks and creation responds. Moses stretches out a staff. Prophets dream. Joseph interprets. Lots are cast. Oil is poured. Hands are laid.
Jesus speaks to storms, bodies, spirits, trees, and graves.
The disciples are sent out to do something. Not merely to believe something.
So where did all of that go?
Many believers have inherited a Christianity in which the supernatural is perfectly acceptable, as long as it happened two thousand years ago.
I have questions about that.
Where is the power in your life?
What does power even mean to you?
How do you distinguish power from authority?
How do you distinguish authority from control?
How do you know when you are operating from God, rather than using God's name to authorize yourself over people?
How do you develop discernment without surrendering your discernment to another person?
I think it may be called practice.
And if Jesus says his followers will do his works — and even speaks of greater works — why have we built a faith where the moment somebody finds their power and makes something happen, we start calling them names?
These are not questions I want someone to answer for me in five minutes. Sit with them. Ponder them. Meditate on them.
They are not invitations to abandon your moral compass.
They are invitations to become mature enough to investigate it.
Maybe redemption was never supposed to produce people who spend the rest of their lives staring backward at the debt.
Maybe redeemed people were supposed to learn how to live.
How to discern. How to heal. How to create. How to govern themselves. How to serve. How to use authority. How to encounter power without compromise.
How to recognize sin without becoming addicted to surveillance.
Jesus surrounded himself with people religious society could classify as sinners.
His own disciples misunderstood him, failed him, denied him, competed with one another, doubted, and continued getting things wrong while being taught.
And he still trained them to do the work.
Apparently perfection was not the prerequisite for apprenticeship.
So why put so much effort into producing people who know what they are forbidden to be — and so little into forming people who know what they are capable of becoming?
Investigate sin if you must.
But then ask the question underneath it:
After sin, then what?
I want to learn how to make it rain.
What about you?
Reflections