Sin Was Never a Courtroom — It's a Corrupted Mind About Your Worth | Who Told You That? | Chad Belew

We say all the time, growth happens in the questions, I want that to be who we are.

What I'm about to tell you today, I think he's going to reframe not just how you think

about sin, but how you think about yourself.

And some of you have heard this a little bit of this, but I think it's going to help us

change some of that mindset.

How you think about God's posture towards you, how you understand what Jesus was actually

doing every time he walked into a room with a broken person?

All right, so let's go, here we go.

I cut this down, usually my sermons are a 15 page paper, literally.

This one's 11, so we'll see what we can do.

It's 11 whole pages guys, single spaced 12 point font, so we're in, it's Georgia for

some reason had just the default of this.

All right, here we go, here we go, huh?

Yeah, it was for me, it was for, yeah, for those who don't know, Georgia be a young woman

softball this week in the SEC tournament and Nate waited a couple hours and then he text

me.

Did they lose to Texas?

Yeah.

Then they lost to tech, Georgia lost to Texas, so, has somebody won the SEC, I stopped watching

Alabama one.

The Texas didn't win either, oh well, all right, here we go, we got a lot, guys, it's

11 pages, single spaced, all right.

Quick catch up for anyone who is just joining us for the past four weeks, we've been tracing

where our picture of God came from.

We landed last week naming this framework, most of us grew up in, penal substitutionary

atonement.

The idea that sin is primarily a legal problem, God is primarily a judge, and Jesus steps

in to absorb the punishment that we owe God, and we trace that framework all the way back

to an 11th century feudal court in a theologian named Ansem, for though I can't go into all

of it, but if you want, the video is on our YouTube, so you can go back and watch that.

Then I asked you a question at the end of service that I left you hanging on, and I said,

so what does Jesus actually say about the human problem?

What is it?

If it's not this, then what does Jesus actually say about the human problem, and that's what

we're going to get into today?

So PSA, penal substitutionary atonement that we looked at last week tells you that the

human problem is legal, you violated a law, penalty is owed, this is what happened in

the garden, and then every sin that you commit, the action that you commit is a breaking of

the law, and that you owe a penalty to God.

And until that penalty is satisfied, the relationship between God and humanity cannot be restored,

there's a separation, like this is what most of us grew up with, right?

But I want to suggest that Jesus actually operates from an entirely different diagnosis

of the human problem, not like softer, not just like nicer version of God, like completely

different than the idea of a legal framework.

Like think about the way that a doctor and a judge would approach the same person differently.

A judge looks at what you did, the action, what law was broken, is a penalty owed, the

judges not primarily interested in your condition, some are really caring people, like we have

some judges that come to church here, they're great people.

But they're focusing on the law, like what does the law say, did you break the law?

So the judge is interested in your record, like your actions, what you have done.

Now a doctor, a doctor looks at what's wrong with you, what's causing this, what has been

damaged, what needs to be healed in order for you to live healthy.

The doctor's job is not to evaluate the action but to understand the condition underneath

it.

PSA handed us a judge, Jesus shows up as something much closer to a doctor.

Before I give you the definition that I'm going to work with today, I want to back up

even further, then Ansem was 11th century, the framework that led PSA, led to PSA in the

11th century, it started with a word, and the word, when we've talked about this before,

it's an original Greek, it's mostly translated as sin, in the New Testament it's hamartia,

and it's, in its origins it is not a legal word at all.

Hamartia, it's actually like an archery term, means to miss the mark, to aim at a target

and to fall short, not to violate a law, not to incur a debt, but to aim at something,

to aim at life, to aim at wholeness, at things you were created for him to miss it.

Prince Audotwah, in his mirror translation, puts it this way, in its singular form, Hamartia

points to a state of mind, a distorted condition, rather than individual, sinful acts.

Sin is not something we do, he says, it is a condition of living out of harmony with

our divine design, it's a very different view, it's a directional word, a purposeful

word, it describes a failure of aim, not a criminal offense, and it fits exactly with

what we see Jesus actually doing when he encounters broken people in the New Testament, he doesn't

issue a verdict, he restores direction for them, so let me grab this, hang on, speaking

of doctors, got neuropathy in my feet from military and it's killing me, all right, what

was I, so where the legal framework come from on all this, there's a man named Augustine

of Hippo, and he's a fourth century theologian, brilliant theologian, has enormous influence

on the Western Christianity, he's a man who shaped a doctrine called original sin, in

a way that would run through everything that came after him, and has anybody heard of original

sin, we've heard of this, this site, okay, we've got some people, cool, not cool, but,

so here's the key moment, I guess in his reading Romans 5, 12, what Paul writes about how sin

entered the world through Adam, in the original Greek, the phrase reads as that, I'm not going

to try and read it, so in the Greek it reads as this, which means because all sinned or

in that all sinned, it's describing the condition that spread, a corruption that entered and

affected everyone, so when Adam sinned, this becomes the framework of what that looks like

in the Greek, when it's translated to Greek, from the Greek, which is originally written,

so a corruption enters and affects everyone, but Augustine was reading in the Latin translation,

and in that text the phrase has been rendered as the bottom one, in whom all sin, in Adam,

all of humanity, literally present in Adam, literally sharing in his guilt, so because,

sometimes in whom, in his translation, and there's a shift that happens in this preposition

that leads Augustine of Hippo to create this idea of original sin being passed down to

us, because, becomes in whom we're in Adam, and so when we all sinned, we literally share

in the guilt of this, and this shift moved an entire theological framework from corruption,

entered humanity, and all have sinned to all of humanity was present in Adam, and therefore

share in his guilt. Does this make sense? A little different. So we inherited corruption,

or the inherited corruption, became inherited guilt, and inherited like sickness was no

longer a sickness, it was a guilt that it changes into where we go in the legal framework,

and specifically the Western church that, where this Latin phrasing developed, the Greek-speaking

Eastern church that is still around today reads the same passage in the original language,

and never arrived at inherited guilt, ever. They held that death and corruption entered

the human condition, but they did not conclude that every person born is guilty before they

have done anything. I know this is messing people up. I get it. Let's look at this. There's

a three line that runs directly into what we were talking about last week that we were

handed. Augustine's inherited guilt, this we were born sinful, leads to Anson's satisfaction

theory, which leads to Calvin's penal substitution, PSA then leads to the altar calls, the gospel

tracks that told you you are guilty, and you need to accept Jesus to avoid hell. Here's

the summary of what that shift produced. By redefining sin as inherent guilt, the doctrine

took Jesus' empowering, healing, restorative message, and turned it into a tool of shame

and disconnection. That's not a small thing. This is the entire emotional center of what

most of us in the Western Christian church inherited. You were handed a doctrine of guilt.

We were handed a doctrine of guilt that was built on a mistranslation of one preposition

in Latin text in the 4th century. The word that Jesus actually used, "hamartia," was

never a legal word to begin with. It's that archery term that describes missing the mark.

If that is what sin actually is, missing the mark of what you were created for, falling

short of the fullness of life and love you were made to live, then the solution is not

a legal transaction. The solution is restored aim, recovered vision, a changed mind about

what you are worth and where you're headed, what purpose is. Here's the definition I'm

going to give you today for sin. Sin is a corrupted mindset that causes human beings

to see themselves and others as worthless than how God actually sees them. It's a mindset

shift. Sin is a corrupted mindset. That's not a legal language. This is perceptual language.

How am I perceiving who I am and who you are? Something went wrong with the way that we assess

worth. This is what sin did. Our own worth, the worth of the person next to us, the worth

of the stranger, the person who fails, the person who is different from us, the problem

is in the perception, not just behavior. Once you see this, take this framework, this

idea, this understanding of sin. Let's go back to Genesis 3 and you think through the

conversations we had. You watch what happens in slow motion. The serpent doesn't approach

Eve with a temptation first. The serpent approaches with a question. Did God really say? Underneath

that question is a distortion. Is God really good? Is God lying to you? Did you actually

hear? Are you sure? Are you really loved and provided for by God? Or is God withholding

something? Even in those verses in Genesis 3, the serpent says, "Oh, when Eve says,

we're not supposed to eat of this tree because we'll become like God." The serpent says,

"Oh, God knows what's going to happen. That's why he doesn't want you to do this." There's

a distorted view of who God is. Are you really worth what God says you're worth? Can you

trust God? That's the move in Genesis 3 that happens. Then Eve grabs the fruit and eats

it. But before all of that, this was not primarily about the fruit. It's about a corrupted perception

of God, which then gives us a corrupted perception of self, of what's actually true. And then

the behavior follows the perception. The corrupted mindset comes first and then the corrupted

action is downstream of it. And you can watch that same sequence play out in every form

of human darkness. Racism is a corrupted mindset about the value of another human being made

in God's image. And what doesn't get said enough is the person doing the devaluing is

almost always operating from a place of broken self perception themselves. If you look at

the research, the psychological research on prejudice and aggression, it's consistently

shows that contempt for others is rarely a sign of someone who feels secure in their

own worth. It is almost always a sign of someone who doesn't. Roy Baumeister, like his decades

of research on violence and aggression, found that the most dangerous people are not those

with low self esteem. There are people with deeply fragile, threatened self self worth,

who cannot tolerate anything that destabilizes it. They need someone beneath them because

they're terrified of what it means if there's no one beneath them. This, this is, this is

what is happening right now. And this is what happened to Tennessee this last week, when

they kicked out the only black constituents or black representatives out of their house

so that they could vote in order to change, redraw lines around Memphis in order to remove

any black representation in the state of Tennessee. Why? Because they were afraid. And when you

see this too, what it does for me is it shifts my view of people. So a representative who

is making these decisions in the house in Tennessee who is saying, yeah, we're going

to do this, but like they're afraid. Why? Because they have a broken mindset. So it can

shift. There's anger because justice needs to be served. But also I'm just sad for them.

They don't know who they are. If they only knew how loved and valued they are without

anything else, then maybe things will change. It's, it's the thing that Jesus says when

he says to love your enemy, it's to see the enemy as human and understand that there's

a, I think, I'm not a psychologist, but I think the therapist that my therapist is

so many, like I, we talk about like little Chad, and like there's like a, there's a little

person, their little child inside of them that is still hurting. That they have not addressed.

So it's racism. You look at abuse. Abuse works the same way a person who degrades, controls

or harms someone they claim to love is not doing it from a place of security. They're

doing it from a place of profound internal poverty. The devaluing of the other person

is always downstream of a corrupted perception of self. I mean, you just keep going. Addiction

often a corrupted sense of one's self worth or value. It's a slow agreement with the lie

that you're not worth the life that you were made for, that you need this thing to be okay,

that without it, you're not enough. Or you just need to forget about it.

And here's the one I think lives probably closest to home for a lot of people in this

room, including myself, people pleasing, performing, shrinking, over apologizing, saying yes when

you mean no, working twice is hard to prove something you can never quite prove. Never

feeling like enough, no matter how much you produce, how well you behave, or how much

you give. That's a corrupted mindset. It's a distorted perception of your own worth, of

our own worth. But we go one step further, because that same corrupted mindset that operates

in individuals also builds systems. Patriarchy is not built by men who are deeply secure in

their sense of worth and identity. No, I'm not telling you that you don't know. Maybe

they need to hear that. It's built by men who need control because they're afraid of

what happens without it. White supremacy is a theology of people who feel genuinely confident

in what they are. Psychologists who study authoritarianism like Robert Altmeyer spent decades on this

consistently find that the need to dominate, exclude, and rank human beings by value is

correlated, not with confidence, shocking, but with fear, with shame, with a fragile identity

that needs an enemy to hold itself together. There's a theory in psychology called terror

management theory. It describes how human beings, when they feel their identity or sense of

meaning is threatened, often respond by clinging more tightly to their end group, the group

that they are part of, and becoming more hostile toward anyone they perceive as other. We don't

see this very often around here. The ugliest expressions of nationalism, tribalism, religious

supremacy are not the products of people who feel whole, they are the products of people

who are terrified. Systems of oppression are downstream of a corrupted mindset about human

earth. It is all part of this corrupted mindset. Their sin, in the truest, deepest sense of

what sin actually is, operating at a collective scale. A shared lie about whose image matters,

whose life has value, and who belongs. Jesus didn't come to negotiate a legal settlement

with those systems. He came to heal the perception that created them. Because sin is not first

a rule broken. Sin is first believed about worth, and the lie that then always spreads

outward, and creates systems that harm. Jesus names this problem, and he demonstrates what

it looks like. Watch Jesus work, because it is not just theology. This is Jesus in a room

with real people, a real person. We are going to look at just a couple real quick. Watch

what he does, and does not do. John chapter 8, women caught in adultery. We talked about

John 8 · chapter mention

this message a lot, the story, the religious leaders that dragged her into public space,

they bring her in front of Jesus, they ask a legal question. The law of Moses says to

stone her, what do you say? They want to verdict. They are operating entirely inside

of this legal framework, and they are using her body as a prop and a theological argument

that she didn't ask to be a part of. Jesus bends down, and he starts writing in the dirt.

We don't know what he wrote, and I think the not knowing is part of the point, because

what he's doing by bending down is refusing to enter their courtroom. He's not engaging

with legal framing. He's doing something entirely different. He stands up and he says, "Let

any one of you, who is without sin, be the first to throw a stone at her." Jesus made

one simple observation in this room with these men. Everyone in this crowd is guilty

under the same system that they're using against her. The legal framework condemns the accusers

too, and one by one, beginning with the oldest, the ones with the longest record, they all

leave. They drop their rocks and they leave, which is exactly what Paul says the law written

on stone tablets is about. It is a ministry of death and condemnation. We talked about

this last week. Not because the law is evil, but because the law applied as legal measuring

stick doesn't heal anyone. It just tells everyone that they're not enough, including the people

holding it so the accusers leave the room, because Jesus wouldn't enter the courtroom.

Then Jesus looks at this woman, and I want you to think about it for a second, not just

about the people who walked out. Maybe there's still people that are watching things happening.

I think something deeper is happening this moment, because Jesus asks, "Where are your

children?" Has no one condemned you? I think the interesting thing when I look at this

story is that we all have accusers. Most of ours, they don't show up holding rocks. They

show up in the middle of the night. They sound like our own voice. They say, "You are what

they said you were. You are what you did. You're broken. You're not enough. You never

were." It sounds like me. Those voices, they in this question that Jesus asked have also

been indicted in the same question, because those voices are working under a framework

that says, "I've got to do something to earn worth and to show you my value." They're

indicted in the same question when Jesus says, "Has no one condemned you?" Jesus says, "Neither

do I." Feel the weight of who's saying that to this woman. This is not a peer giving

her a pass. This is the only person in the room who actually had the standing to condemn

her, and he doesn't. Then we love this. The church loves this next section where it says,

"Go and send no more." I don't read that as legal instruction anymore, because if Jesus

doesn't operate in the legal framework, then he wouldn't be saying something in a legal

system and in a legal way. I read it through a lens of everything this series has been

building on. I would like to propose that this means go and send no more means go and believe

differently about yourself. Go and stop agreeing with the corrupted mindset. Go and live from

what I just told you is true about your worth. Stop letting the lie run the show. They don't

define you and neither do your thoughts about yourself. The one that defines you is the one

that's not condemning you, the one that's telling you that you are worth it, that stood

in this temple with you in front of your accusers and showed you that no one can condemn you.

Now, go and believe that you are worth more than you've been told or that you tell yourself.

But that sin, that this change of mindset, is metanoia. He didn't clear the accusers

so that he could walk her away like unchanged, right? He was like, "Okay, they're gone now.

You can sneak out." He cleared the accusers so that she could finally see herself the

way the he saw her and live from that. Jesus has a word for the solution and we've buried

it in so much legal and emotional freight that it barely resembles what it originally

meant. It's that word metanoia. We translated it as repentance, but what it actually means

is something much more alive than what most of us were handed. Meta means change or shift,

a movement. Noya, it comes from noise. It means mind or perception or the way you see.

So we look at this word and the build up of it and how it's put together, metanoia means

change your mind. Turn around, see differently. Come back to what is true. It's not primarily

a guilt word. It's a directional word. It's not describing a transaction to make with

God. It is describing a movement, a shift in perception, a return to who you are, your

original design, the understanding of your value. So when Jesus opens his ministry, the

first thing he does in Mark 115, his very first public words are, "The kingdom of God

has come near, repent, and believe the good news." And inside of the framework, the PSA

framework that most of us grew up in, the church heard that as field guilty because judgment

is coming. But what if it's closer to change the way you see? Come back to reality. What

you've been looking for, what you were actually made for is right here, right now, closer than

you think. This is the good news. It's not a courtroom summons. It's someone who loves

you calling you home. I think about a friend sitting you down and being like, "Hey, this

isn't you. I don't care what they said or did. That is not who you are. Jesus, come back.

Come back home. I hear something I want you to notice. When you take this framework and

you look at it, Scripture is saturated with this language of mind, of perception, thinking,

not guilt management, but mindset transformation. Look at consistently the Bible points at the

way that you see as the thing that needs to change. Paul writes to the Romans, "Do not

conform to the pattern in this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Transform." The Greek word is metamorphol. Same root as metanoia. Change at the level

of form. Change the perception. It happens through the renewing of your mind, not the

clearing of your record. To the Corinthians, he says, "We take captive every thought to

make it obedient to Christ. Every thought, not every action, every thought. The battle

is happening at the level of perception before it ever reaches behavior." Romans 8, "The

mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. Life and peace, not compliance and acquittal."

It comes from what the mind is set on. Jesus himself, Matthew 6, isn't giving legal ruling.

He addresses the way his listeners are seeing their own lives. He says, "Don't worry about

tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to worry about itself." As he tells him, he's asking to change

how you see your circumstances. Stop focusing on that. I want you to see yourselves as held

by the Father who knows what you need. If he feeds the birds, then he's going to take

care of you. This is a perceptual transformation. Metanoia in real time. If you want to go back

to the Old Testament, Solomon, the wisest man, right? He says, "As plainly as it can

be said, as a man thinks in his heart so he is." So he is. Not so does he. Your perception

of yourself is producing you. The person you are becoming is downstream of what you believe

is true about who you are. The Bible is not primarily a book about

the energy guilt. It is a book about transforming perception, minds being renewed, aim being

restored, people learning to see themselves as God sees them. And the beauty of the Bible

is that God allowed us to write it. It is human stories about their relationship with

God. There are times in there where it's like, "What is happening right now?" And I would

be like, "I don't know if you've heard people say this before. I have." Where they're like,

"Well, God told me." Did he? And we get a story of the prodigal. Jesus, I told you

a couple weeks ago, or the last one, I don't remember. Jesus makes this story up. This

is not a real story. This is not a dad who he talked to in an interview. This is a story

he makes up about a dad and two sons. He's telling a parable. Just like he probably didn't

talk to a lady about her lost coin right before that. He's trying to explain something. He's

given a story. The younger son doesn't just make bad choices. He comes home with a corrupted

mindset about his own worth. You can hear it in the speech that he rehearses on the way

back. Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be

called your son. I'm no longer worthy. He has tied his worth to his actions. He performed

badly. Therefore, he is worth less. Therefore, he's no longer a son. He has accepted the

lie, not just about what he did, but about what he is. His solution is to offer himself

as a servant, because servants are hired for what they produce. He's trying to trade his

performance for a lower rung of belonging. The father, before the speech gets out, is

already running towards him. Then watch the father does. He doesn't hand him a checklist.

He doesn't put him on probation. He doesn't make him earn his way back to sonship. He

puts a robe on him. In that culture, the robe is dignity, status, covering. It says that

you belong here. Then he puts a ring on his finger. It's the family's signet ring. It's

legal identity. It's authority. It says you have standing here. You are recognized here.

You are my son. He puts sandals on his feet. Servants were barefoot. Sons were sandals.

The father is drawing a line. You're not a servant. You were never just a servant. He

throws a party. He calls him my son. Not my repentant employee. Not my forgiven debtor.

There wasn't a conversation about, "Oh, hey, the inheritance I gave you, so we're going

to work that off and you're going to pay me back." None of that. He's my son. The father

doesn't restore the behavior. He restores the identity of his son because he understands

something the son doesn't yet. The worth was never gone. The perception of worth was corrupted.

The father uses every symbol at his disposal to say, "Change your mind about who you are."

This is Metanoia, administered through a robe, a ring, and a party. In a story, the older

brother who stayed, who worked, who never missed a day. He's furious. The father says

to him, "Why does he get a party? I've been here the whole time. I've been doing everything

you've asked me to do. I have been perfect." The father says to him, "Son, you are always

with me and everything I have is yours. It was always yours. You've been standing in the

inheritance refusing to enjoy it because you turned it into a transaction. Both sons had

a corrupted mindset about their worth. One thought he lost it through failure. The other

was white knuckling his way toward it through obedience. The father, in both cases, is saying

the same thing. "You are my son. That is not contingent upon what you do. It never was."

This tells this story deliberately, has a picture of what God is like, and the story Jesus

chose to tell, "Nobody earns their way home. Nobody performs their way to belonging. Worth

is restored. Identity is restored. Perception is restored, and no blood had to be spilled."

Metanoia is the answer to what Jesus says about the human problem, that the problem is

not primarily legal. It is perceptual. Something corrupted the way humans see. Humanity sees

itself, sees each other, sees God. That corrupted vision produces corrupted behavior. But the

behavior is always downstream of the perception. Always. The solution is not primarily legal.

It is a restoration of vision, a change mind, a person who generally begins to see themselves

as fully loved, not performing for love, not earning it, not managing, but simply held

in it. That person becomes free. My hand says, "It is for freedom. It is for freedom."

The freedom of love, without needing something back, free to be generous, free to sit with

someone who is suffering. John tells us in 1 John, "We love because we first loved

us. Not we love because we are supposed to. Not we love because we owe something, because

we were loved first." It is the operating system that Jesus is trying to install. You

are loved. Believe this. Change your mind. Metanoia. I am going to end with a question

for you for this week. When you think about the worst version of yourself, the patterns

that you keep returning to, the places you feel most like a failure, what is the lie

underneath it? What is lying to you, telling you what your value is? Now, what did you do?

What did you believe about yourself that made you feel inevitable? Because if you can find

the lie, the corrupted perception underneath the behavior, I think then we are much closer

to the actual healing than any amount of guilt ever got you. Jesus didn't walk into rooms

and make people feel guilty. He walked into rooms and told people the truth about what

they were worth, not feel worse. They would see differently, not pay more. It was come

back to what is true, not try harder. It was change your mind. Metanoia. It's arsenal.

As Paul prays in Ephesians, he prays that you be rooted in love. You would just find

the depths of it. The prayer is that you would be rooted in love, because from there, you

can begin to believe who you are. It's rooting in that love that gives us the metanoia, the

change of mind. It fixes this human problem of we are broken, that we're not good enough.

And just like a corrupted mindset creates corrupted systems, a healed mindset can do the same.

It can enter into systems that need healing, and it can begin to tear down some walls and

begin to build new ones, not new ones, but build new ways of doing things, be driven

by love. So arsenal, be rooted in that love, because it's weird, loved, and then we get

to go love. I'm going to pray real quick, better gotten. God, the scripture tells us

is love. I thank you for that love. God, I pray for each and every mind in this room.

The lies that we each believe about ourselves, about our self-worth, about our value, about

what it takes for us to prove who we are. I pray that we would, as Paul says, capture

those thoughts, and then run them through the filter of Jesus. Run them through the filter

of love to see if this is a mindset and a thought that tells me my worth as defined

by my Creator. And if it doesn't, highlight that for me so I know how to get rid of it.

Spirit I ask that you would remind us who we are. As a lion, there's our mind that we

would be reminded of the love that we have from you. You've got to pray for each and

every mom in this room, or another figure that is attached to anyone in this room. And

we're a thankless job so often. You've got to pray that today they would experience your

love, even through those around them. Your love would work through the people in their

lives as convicts of your love to show them what they love and their value, not because

they're good moms, but because they are created in the image of God. And that the good mom

part is just an outpouring of their love from the love that you've given. I think that

this is the place that most of us have experienced your love in the greatest way possible. I

thank you for our moms, for those that have loved us well. Change your minds. Maybe intermittent

noise that we can experience love and peace and live from that place. That's in your name

that we pray. The name of love. Amen. Our sleepy love this week. And then go love well,

is who we want me to be. Britney's got announcements. Yes. That was amazing. Moms, do not forget