How much sin should we expect in the church? We have gauges for other elements of church life. We generally monitor attendance. We know how many people are in small groups. Somebody counts the offerings. And often we don't just measure what we're interested in—we set goals.

Anybody hear of a church that set a goal for a 5-percent sin reduction next year?

I don't mean to be glib about this. Sin is, somehow, at the root of all human misery. Sin is what keeps us from God and from life. It is in the face of every battered woman, the cry of every neglected child, the despair of every addict, the death of every victim of every war.

Pastors have historically understood their primary battle to be not the battle to build a big church, but the battle against the power of sin. "We wrestle not against flesh and blood …" Christians have measured the seriousness of the battle by the suffering and bleeding of Calvary.

And sin doesn't seem to be going away, either outside or inside the church. So how should we be thinking about sin, in our congregations and in ourselves?

"If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us," writes John.

It always helps to begin by identifying the boundaries over which error lies. Then at least we know what mistakes to avoid. And one boundary is the notion that we can be fully rid of sin in this life; that by enough vigilance and will-power and careful adherence to rules we can reach what used to be called sinless perfection (is there another kind?).

The problem with what might be called the "victorious Christian living" mindset is not that it takes sin too seriously. The problem is it inevitably becomes selective about which sins God hates the most, and they always end up being somebody else's sins. It misses the deeper layers of sin: sin not just as concrete acts of lying or cheating, but the sin of narcissism that infects my preaching and image-management that corrupts my conversations; the sin in my motives and emotions that is real but that I cannot simply turn off.

Jesus told the story about the tax collector and the Pharisee to a group of people "who were content in their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else."

The irony is that "looking down on everybody else" is a violation of the law of love, which according to Jesus is the absolute essence of righteousness. Sin is protean. It is a cancer that keeps mutating, and just when you think you have killed off one form, it turns out a deadlier strain yet is threatening your heart.

Recalibrating your sin monitor

There is a paradox about sin: it may be impossible to know how well you're doing at battling it. People who are in great physical shape usually know it. Musicians who have honed their craft could generally tell you how.

But when is the last time someone whose soul you deeply admire said to you: "I have really been on a roll when it comes to overcoming sin lately"? Those souls among us who are doing the best in contesting it don't seem to think they're doing particularly well. Maybe this is more than just modesty or neurosis. Maybe they're aware of the insidious danger.

Somebody asked Dallas Willard once if he believed in total depravity. His reply was that he believed in "sufficient depravity." Never having run into that doctrine before, the interviewer asked for clarification. Dallas said, "I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved so that no one will ever get into heaven and say, 'I merited this.'"

Perhaps we are sufficiently depraved that the more we grow spiritually, the more our awareness grows of the health and sanity of what a life freed from depravity would look like.

Psychologists who study incompetence say that the first result of incompetence is the inability to perceive my incompetence. Maybe spiritual growth involves an increased capacity to diagnose the true condition of my soul.

But shouldn't I be making progress?

On the other hand, almost every page of the New Testament letters includes statements, not simply about the change people will experience one day, but the transformation that seems to be expected now.

Peter says, "You have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other."

Paul says to the church at Thessalonica: "Your faith is growing more and more, and the love you have for one another is increasing."

A sobering observation about the battle against sin is offered in Hebrews: "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood."

Whatever else the New Testament teaches, it is surely more than the hope that God will get a group of justified people into heaven when they die. Paul clearly believed that, with the power of the Holy Spirit, a new way of living was available to ordinary human beings in a new kind of redemptive community. And that they ought to expect this.

Imagine an alcoholic going into an AA meeting and hearing: "We're so glad you're here. We want you to know that you are loved and forgiven through nothing you have done. Of course, don't expect to change too much. Don't expect to actually stop drinking. We don't like it when people suggest sobriety is possible. We believe that trying not to drink breeds arrogance and self-sufficiency. We have a little bumper sticker: '12-steppers are not sober, just forgiven.'"

The whole point of AA (which morphed out of the Oxford Group's attempt to re-capture classic Christian spiritual practices in the early twentieth century) was to bring freedom from a spiritual power (what the Blue Book calls the "cunning, baffling, powerful, patient" enemy of addiction) that was destroying lives.

This is not to say that people in churches could expect to stop sinning the way people in AA stop drinking. Addiction itself is closely related to sin, and sin is infinitely more complex, subtle, and baffling.

And more dangerous.

One advantage that AA has over most local congregations is this: people going to a 12-step group often know in their bones that their problem will destroy their lives.

For the most part, we simply do not have that understanding about sin.

Recognizing the badness of sin

I re-read Neal Plantinga's Not The Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin on a regular basis. In fact, if this article does nothing else, it will be worth writing if it convinces you to read his book once every few years.

He writes of how we have largely lost awareness of sin; how sin was once something Christians hated, feared, grieved, and fled; now when we see the word at all it tends to be on menus ("Sinful Chocolate Decadence").

However, the awareness of sin cannot be recovered simply by trying to crank up the volume when we talk about it. Merely saying loudly and often that sin is bad will not create the tectonic shift needed in our souls. We need to thoroughly understand what it is that is bad about sin, which is power to corrupt the goodness of life:

"Sin is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it—both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a missing of the mark, a spoiling of goods, a staining of garments, a hitch in one's gait, a wandering from the path, a fragmenting of the whole. Sin is what culpably disturbs shalom. Sinful human life is a caricature of proper human life."

We often speak of how people cannot comprehend the wonder of grace unless they grasp the badness of sin. And that is true. But it is equally true that people cannot grasp the badness of sin until they grasp the goodness of the life that sin corrupts.

When we do not understand the destructiveness of sin, we are more concerned about getting punished for our sins than the way we are punished by them.

Does God tire of forgiving the same sins?

Does the persistence of sin in my life threaten my salvation? People don't generally ask aloud, but they wonder: How much sin can there be in my life before I need to start worrying? In other words, is there a level of sin that is in the acceptable zone for a Christian, but if you go higher, you're in danger—like the level of mercury in Lake Michigan? Is there a low tolerance for impurity—like FDA standards for homogenized milk? Or is it more like the purity standards for hot dogs—lots of room for junk?

Is it possible to be a Christian and just never grow?

The problem with these is that they are the wrong questions. The issue is not whether God will stop forgiving sins. Jesus told Peter he needed to forgive an offender not seven times, but seventy times seven. And he wasn't saying Peter could withhold forgiveness for transgression number 491.

Jesus' point was that forgiving is always the right response to sincere repentance. God is not worried that he might be taken advantage of. He is not afraid that some bad boy will use his charm to put one over on heaven.

The problem is that, eventually, I become as used to my sin as I am to the watch on my wrist. I habituate. It doesn't bother me any more. I stop even wanting to be rid of it.

Sin damages my capacity for God. Sin blinds. The danger is not that God won't respond to my repeated repentance; the danger is that I might become so ensnared that I become simply unable or unwilling to repent. This is the dynamic at work when Paul says, "And God gave them over to a depraved mind."

So the question isn't "How much sin am I allowed?" The question is "Am I moving toward the darkness or toward the light? Am I growing toward God, or away from him? Am I becoming more sensitive and responsive to Jesus?"

It is because of this that sin is to be taken so seriously. Paul says to the church at Galatia: "Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted."

He doesn't just say: "Invoke church discipline if there's a sexual scandal." He says we're to help one another move toward freedom from sin. From all kinds of sin.

It is interesting in our day that many churches speak much of Matthew 18:15 and the need for values around resolving conflict. But that is only one application of the larger need stated in Galatians 6:1, which is for Christians not just to confront conflict but more generally to confront sin.

This can be done in a way that is not judgmental, because the reality is that we are in no position to judge the actual amount of spiritual growth that has taken place in another person; we do not see the genetic material they wrestle with; we do not know the forces that have shaped them.

Frank Laubach preached the gospel to a tribe that had a long history of violence. The chief was so moved by Laubach's presentation that he accepted Christ on the spot. He then turned to Laubach in gratitude and said, "This is wonderful. Who do you want me to kill for you?"

That's his starting point.

I was raised in a church where the Scriptures were taught, given parents who loved me and each other, in a city where being a Protestant Christian was considered normal. So if I think I am superior to the chief because I'm less likely to kill somebody, I'm sadly deluded.

The question is: Am I moving toward the light, and helping others do the same? If I see someone trapped in sin and do nothing to try to help, that is not love. It is the sin of conniving. Conspiring to allow sin to flourish and human life to suffer.

Awakening healthy guilt

As a leader I have to ask myself, "What are the sins in my congregation (and my life) that no one feels guilty over?"

Do I have the courage to awaken guilt?

Taylor Branch wrote how in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s bus drivers would accept money from African-American riders, but then would make them disembark and walk on the sidewalk to re-enter through the rear door lest they touch a white person going down the center aisle.

Sometimes, for the fun of cruelty, drivers would take the money and drive off while the person was walking toward the back door, leaving them without fare or transportation.

There was a sin of anger here. But it was not that black people got angry.

It was that white people did not.

Worse, it was that white people, who read the Bible and worshiped in church, did not rise up in fury to demand justice.

Are we lifting up and recognizing and encouraging the sin-convicting ministry of the Holy Spirit?

At Willow Creek recently, Bill Hybels preached a series called "Enough." After one of the sermons, he challenged members of the congregation to raise their hands if they were willing to surrender their possessions and lifestyles fully to God and actually decide to use their resources to serve the poor and honor God. There was a time for public declaration of intent.

Then Bill said he wanted to have a word with all the folks who did not raise their hands. And this is what he said: "I hope you have a terrible afternoon. And then I hope you have a terrible evening. I hope the Holy Spirit keeps after you, and you have to keep thinking this one through, until you're able to raise your hand as well."

Sins I know and sins I don't

But what's most difficult about sin isn't so much what to do about sin in the congregation I serve. It's what to do about the sin in me! The hard part of sin is my sin.

I get angry at people for not doing what I want. I avoid confrontation I know is needed because I want to avoid pain. I am apathetic toward injustice. I lust. I use other people. I manipulate. I get defensive. I am ungrateful for blessings. I withdraw.

Sometimes I am aware of my sin as I'm doing it.

The other night my wife asked me if I had someone's number on my cell phone. I immediately said no. The truth was, I was pretty sure it was on my phone, but I didn't want to take the ten seconds needed to look. I didn't want to tell her that, so I said no.

Then I felt bad.

So I had to stop, look my wife in the eye, and tell her that I lied to her, and that the reason for my lie was that I didn't want to give up ten seconds. (It turns out the number wasn't on my cell phone after all. Hmm. Are you lying if it turns out by accident you were telling the truth?)

It was humiliating and embarrassing, and is so small that even in the telling, it makes me look more sensitive to sin than I really am.

Sometimes my sin is so close to me, like my skin, I don't even know it's there.

What matters most, I suppose, is not so much that I am trying to reduce the sin factor. It's that I come to love the life God has created, the shalom God cherishes, and hate the sin that corrupts it, not because I am so "righteous" but because that life is so good.

Can my sin ever be totally tamed? Not in this life. Much of the sin that is in me I'm not even conscious of yet. As I grow more spiritually aware, I'll see deficits I don't have the sensitivity to see right now.

But even the sins I'm aware of are constantly tempting me. The Bible says, "We wrestle … ." We wrestle—not against flesh and blood. We wrestle—and as we faithfully wrestle, God allows us victories along the way. We wrestle—and as we wrestle, a Friend greater than we know is somehow at work wrestling in us and for us and through us.

The greatest sin would be to stop wrestling.

John Ortberg is pastor of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California, and editor at large of Leadership journal.

Reprinted from our sister publication, Leadership journal, © 2009 Christianity Today. For more articles like this, visit www.leadershipjournal.net.