Years ago, my pastor preached a message from Romans 8, which starts “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” It took me some years to realize, but what I actually took away from that message was definitely not his intended point. I realized that for all my life, I’d been operating in fear of condemnation: fear of myself, fear of others, especially fear of God. I’d inherited and been taught a deep fear of being punished.
As I matured over the next five or six years, I realized that in one way or another, my response to sin was to fear being trapped by it, surrendering to it, or accidentally committing some unpardonable thing that would condemn me to hell. The more I obsessed about sin, the more control it had. It took a while for that realization to fully bear fruit, but the eventual outcome was that I shed that fear, and most importantly I realized that sin truly had no control over me. I began to understand Paul’s comments about…