What your sin looks like to God

The smell was overpowering.  It was the smell of rot, of sickness, of death.  It was everywhere I walked and wouldn't leave my nose no matter what.  I was in a place of absolute despair, a hopeless, joyless, dark place where people and animals alike simply await death.  It could come today, tomorrow, or next week, and was the only thing to look forward to.  Overpowering death.

The average person who attends church, even semi-regularly, knows the right things to say about the tarnish that our personal sin brings to our life.  We will speak on the separation that it brings between us and God, the ugliness of it, the hopelessness it brings when we live our lives in it.  But there is a difference between repeating what we have heard in church and in seeing it with our own eyes.  When what we know goes from our head and transfers into our heart, we begin to see things differently.  We begin to see things as God sees them, and in that God can change the way we look at life.

I had such an experience recently in Iquitos, Peru that I will share with you in this post.  It was significant because it showed me what my sin looks like to the Lord, and it showed me what Jesus did to bring me out of it.  I share it with you in the hope that you will process these images as I did and will do something about it.  When you and I begin to see things as God sees them, we are changed, we are healed, and we are come alive for the first time.

Iquitos is a busy city of over 400,000 people situated on the Amazon river in Peru.  It can only be reached by airplane or via a very long boat trip.  This has given the city a unique history that unfortunately includes significant depravity.  Just as many sinful things are done in the dark, this city has thrived as a center of the sex-tourism industry for some time because it is so isolated from the rest of the world.  This industry, particularly as it manifests itself in Iquitos, involves terrible acts that I will not describe here.  Along with that, heavy drug use and debilitating poverty have followed closely behind this city's focus on sin.  In spite of this there is a lot of regular tourism in the city due to its proximity to the Amazon river and the jungle.  There are places where tourists go and there are places where tourists are encouraged to avoid going.  Our team went into one of those unvisitable places called Belen.

Belen is along the waterfront and consists of shacks built up high to stay mostly above the yearly flooding from the river.  Other "homes" are built on logs and are designed to float when the river rises.  Many of the homes have a floating outhouse built over the water.  Nearby the outhouses one will see people bathing in the same river water, washing their clothes in it, or gathering water for cooking and drinking.  The homes have no doors or windows.  They may have a table and a few chairs in them, but little else.  This part of the city is essentially a waterfront slum.

Into the worst part of the worst place

Our destination was near the waterfront into the worst part of the worst place.  We were going to minister to the drug addicts that lived in the slum below the raised houses.

We were transported down to Belen on a three wheeled cart referred to as a Motokar.  When we arrived, we stepped onto a wet, grimy street.  Vendors line the streets selling everything from bananas to raw meat, all out in the open.  Other vendors cook food and handle it without gloves or clean utensils.  Vultures circle overhead, occasionally bold enough to land and pick at a dead dog or cat on the street.  Huge numbers of discarded, rotting bananas are piled up near the waterfront.  The stench is powerful.

We began the journey by descending a large group of concrete stairs, covered in places by green slime.  One has to watch their step going down because the slime is slippery.  We paused under a house halfway down the steps to circle up and pray.  The missionary reminded us all that we were there to show love to those who are unloved, cast off, and forgotten.  We prayed to the Lord, the source of love, for help with this.  We prayed asking that we would be a blessing to the people there, and we prayed that the people would receive the good news about Jesus.

Shortly afterward we continued down the steps, each carrying sacks of sandwiches for the people.  We crossed a huge puddle in the filthy street that could only be crossed by walking on a wet board laid across it.  We then turned a corner.  Around the corner we saw people everywhere who were hanging around in shops and in the street.  They were dirty and had a dull look in their eyes that marked despair in their lives.  And then we reached the entrance to the worst part of the worst place.

It was an opening between the stilts of a house and it led down a dark corridor.  After passing under one house we found ourselves under a second house where we found a large group of people who were recovering from last night's drug binge.  They were dirty.  Some had slept on the ground or on a platform.  A man lit a cigarette containing a less pure and more dangerous version of crack cocaine.  Skinny dogs rummaged through the trash piled high everywhere.  A large pig was penned up in a corner away from any hope of sunlight.  The stench was overpowering.  Vultures rested on boards that had been nailed between house stilts and they picked through the trash, eyeing the people who had come into their realm.  An evil presence was tangible in this place.  And in the eyes of the men and women there I saw death.  They had given up and had nothing to live for.  Nobody had voiced that to me, but they didn't need to.

We passed out the sandwiches and were quickly mobbed by hungry people.  We poured drinks for them and talked to them as we could and as they would allow.  Beyond providing food, our plan was pretty simple.  We would share the good news about Jesus Christ to these men and ask them for a response.  We also planned to offer help to them out of their life of drug addiction.  If anyone would take us up on the offer, we would personally escort them to a safe house and rehabilitation clinic in the city.

Rejection

After feeding them our leader began preaching about Jesus.  Instantly about two-thirds of the people headed for the exits.  But he kept up, telling them in Spanish about Jesus and His great love for them.  He told them the story of his life, about how he had formerly been one of them.  And they knew he spoke the truth because many of them remember the way he used to be.  He was a legend in these parts, but not for the right reasons.

He finished and introduced Pastor Paul and I was thrown front and center with the reluctant audience.  I told them the story described in one of Jesus's parables from Matthew 13 about a man who planted a good crop only to later discover that weeds had grown up with the crop.  It was a story about God and how he knows which people are His followers, and which are not.  It is a story about what will happen at the end of time when He returns.

I explained to the men what the parable meant using words that Jesus used.  The farmer in the story represented Jesus, the farm workers were His angels, the good crop of wheat represented the followers of Jesus, and the weeds were the evil people who rejected God's ways and wouldn't follow Him.  I explained to them that Jesus shows compassion to the world by waiting until He is able to draw in the most people who will believe.  He could end it all right now, but He does not because He does not want anyone to choose a life forever separated from Him.

I asked them for a response.  Who would step forward to receive Jesus and leave this ugly life?  All that is required is belief!  God would do the rest, and He does not want them to continue in this type of living!

I was met with a response of silence.  Several men had listened intently to the story but none would acknowledge belief.  They remained seated among the death and despair, enslaved.

What our sin looks like to God

Our leader went back to speaking and I had a moment to take in the scene.  Around me were sitting men who were clearly under the influence.  Others were recovering from last night and appeared dazed.  The trash, the filth, the evil, the stench...everything was overwhelming in that moment.  A vulture sitting high above all of his peers opened his wings and turned his head sideways to look at me.  He seemed to say "this is my realm."  And so it was.  His was a realm of death and disease and despair, and there was no hope to be seen anywhere.  And I saw a picture, a visual representation at that moment, of my spiritual condition apart from Jesus.

The problem many Americans have is that they cannot relate to imagery like this.  Most have never lived in or even seen anything that even closely resembles a slum.  Worse yet, many churchgoing Americans seem to believe that sins can be ranked.  A murderer, for example, is much worse than someone who just drinks too heavily.  A child rapist is worse than someone who merely looks at pornography.  A thief is worse than someone who cannot bear to miss a meal or who eats too much.  But that just is not the case in God's eyes.  Sin is sin.  It is all vile and repulsive.  Our sin separates us hopelessly from God.  It is, all of it, a terminal disease that will eventually take the life of the one who holds onto it.

For you and your sins it looks no different to God.  Even if you go to church each week, you still sin each and every day.  It could be that you steal from your workplace by taking supplies or not working when you are on the clock.  Or your personal idol may be money.  You worship it by shopping all of the time, or by dreaming of getting the next big gadget, or by trusting it to bail you out of hardship or difficulty instead of relying on God.  You may be one of the countless Americans who look at pornography in private.  Nobody knows about it but you and God, so it is a secret, right?  Or maybe your work is your idol.  You sacrifice to it by giving all of your time to it, never leaving much to your family or loved ones.  Your entire significance comes from your work, and you wouldn't know what to do if your job evaporated.

All of these things and more are sins.  They separate you from God.  And to God, you are the one sitting in the middle of a slum with vultures eyeing you.  The garbage heap all around you is composed of the many sins you have committed all your life.  You can sweep them into piles and try to tidy them up, but they don't go away.  The pile just gets higher and smellier. 

For many churchgoers, you have added to the piles of garbage with all of the good things you have done to try to appease God and get Him on your side.  Yet you have never really believed and allowed God to change your life.  To a casual observer, your life is no different now than it was when you said that you decided to follow Jesus.  There is no life change;  no fruit. 

The prophet Isaiah once said that our righteous deeds, on their own as a vehicle to get us on God's side, are like menstrual rags. 

Isaiah 64:6
 ⁶ We are all infected and impure with sin.
    When we display our righteous deeds,
    they are nothing but filthy rags.
Like autumn leaves, we wither and fall,
    and our sins sweep us away like the wind.

If the good things you do to justify yourself to God are of that quality to the Lord, what must your sin look like?  Yet you continue with the mentality of doing a mission trip here, a good deed there, an act of service sporadically done, and these will surely appease God and put you on his good side.  You sit on the garbage heap, and you think everything is okay.  Your eyes show you a world that isn't that bad, and you don't know any differently.  God's eyes see a different story.  His eyes see things as they really are.

Jesus meets you in your personal slum

I quickly realized that what we did in going into this slum is the exact thing Jesus did when He came into each of our lives. 

At some time in everyone's life Jesus walks into the mess and the filth, walking among our piles of garbage.  This usually comes in the form of a friend who follows Jesus who cares enough to speak to you about faith.  Sometimes it may come in the form of a dream about a man who beckons you to follow.  For others, they first perceive that there may be a Creator by seeing the works of His hands all around them. 

Romans 1
¹⁹ They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. ²⁰ For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.

He locks eyes with you and suddenly the darkness you were sitting in is filled with light from Him.  And He communicates truth and love and invites you out of the filth, offering to bandage the wounds life has provided, requiring a bath and offering us a change of clothes.  The only thing you have to do is stand up and follow Him out of the place of despair and death.  The past can really be in the past, and the future really can be different.  Following Him out of this place puts you on a narrow, difficult path, and the journey lasts a lifetime.  Often that path is more difficult than the path your life was on beforehand, but the end result is more than worth it.  He leads us to life and love.  And everyone gets to choose.  Some choose to follow;  others stay in the filth. 

I have long had appreciation for what Jesus did for me when He came into my life, but I have never seen it represented so vividly as I did on that day.  I, the one on the trash heap, hopeless and in despair but not really knowing it.  I, the one who is unable to get on God's good side by doing anything on my own.  And He, the One I waited for my whole life, the fulfillment of love and source of love.  The One who came into the mess of my life to invite me to a better one and to lead me.  The King who stooped to lift me up, not because He had to, but because He wanted to.  The leader who went the way and showed the way.  The King of all kings and Lord of all lords.

Some of you reading this have already chosen to leave the filth you were in.  Maybe it was drugs or sexual perversion or some other unnamed thing.  You all had your own personal slum that Jesus is leading you away from.  The path is tough and will likely have more difficult parts.  I encourage you to keep walking and keep surrendering more of your life to Him.  The end result is worth it.  He is the end result. 

Still others who are reading this still sit amid the piles of filth and grime and disease.  The vultures eye you greedily.  And you sit, sometimes proudly or perhaps in despair of life itself, and you won't get up.  It isn't so bad, you say.  Things may get better.  And in sitting you reject the one who calls out to you to leave the mess.  Life is ahead!  But you just won't get up because you won't believe or because the road ahead is uncertain.  I encourage you to get up and walk!  Find a friend who knows Jesus for real and talk to that person about what you need to do.  Your next steps of committing your life to Him are simple, but they are not easy.  A real Christian friend can show you the way.

I pray that these words will deeply impact those in the Church who need them as well as those outside of the Church.  You both sit on a trash pile, but there is a way out.