Perhaps your mother taught you right from wrong. Perhaps even your father. Perhaps they used the word “sin” to designate wrong.
Perhaps parents plus the type of church you attended tried to scare you into right actions through the threat of going to hell.
Why do you try to avoid doing the wrong things now? Or do you? I hope so.
I rather like the way John Wesley put it that good people avoid sin from the love of virtue, while wicked people avoid sin from a fear of punishment.
Jesus did sometimes talk about how people of a certain type will be thrown into the garbage dump where the fire never went out (a real place outside Jerusalem as illustration). Jesus’s teaching for us was to be that type of person Wesley described as lovers of virtue.
We avoid sin because that’s the kind of people we have become.
Gary Mintchell
Faith Venture 