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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.

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.

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