None of us are perfect. No one is without sin.
Sometimes we do fall into sin through weakness or attachment to certain vices, however God tells us that we should repent (repent literally means to do an about-face and turn away). Repentance isn't just feeling guilty or sorry about what we did, it means to have true moral and spiritual sorrow for having offended God through sin, asking for His forgiveness, and resolving to AVOID sin and situations that would encourage us to sin.
If you put homosexuality on the sin scale, I daresay it'd be lesser ranked than mean gossip about a co-worker.
That's not what the Bible says. Do you not believe that the entire Bible (both Old and New Testaments) are the inspired Word of God?
Jesus died for our sins. We are saved by Grace. We do nothing and can do nothing to deserve the Grace of God. It is a gift.
Agreed
It is a beautiful gift that I am not worthy of having, but that He gave it to me anyway.
Again, I agree, and share this sentiment, Lady.
I'm not going to devalue that gift by thinking I'm some how more deserving that someone else.
I do not think I (or those who agree with what I'm saying) feel more deserving than anyone else. In fact, I am constantly amazed by God's mercy and grace. Each time I go to Church, we always begin worship by asking for Christ's mercy and for His forgiveness.
No one is more deserving than anyone else.
No one is more deserving, but that is not my argument. My argument is not that I deserve God's grace more than an adulterer, or homosexual, or abortionist. My argument is that the adulterer, homosexual, abortionists must heed God's call to repentance and completely turn away from their sins. We cannot love sin and love Christ at the same time. We cannot have two masters.
God knows we can't be perfect, He knows we are merely dust.
This should not be an excuse or license to sin though.
Nothing can separate us from the gift of God's love.
You have to keep that quote in its appropriate context. Obviously the souls in Hell are separated from God's love.
Our call as Christians? To be Christ in the world.
And what did Christ do? OBEY His Heavenly Father, WALKED the path of righteousness. Christ said go and sin no more.
And to care for the least of these.
Caring for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden is definitely a good thing, but this does not mean we should neglect the most important ills of our society--the ones that kill souls and send them to Hell.
There's no renunciation duties,
We are to renounce the world, renounce sin, renounce Satan.
no judgement duties listed. To be Christlike is to love.
God does not separate His love from His Justice. Loving us does not mean excusing our sins. Also, when we sin, we are saying to God that we are rejecting Him and His love.
Whose sin is worse than someone else's? How would I know? God knows, but I can't know. I know everyone is a sinner.
The Bible says (and I quoted this earlier) that there are sins not unto death, and then there are sins unto death (mortal sins).
So there are clearly, according to the Bible, some sins that are more grave than others.
And you don't get to say, "but I'm trying not to sin, so I'm different" 1. I don't see how that matters because you are human and you WILL fail. and 2. You don't know what that gay person is thinking in his heart. We all have our struggles.
I may fail, but with God's grace I won't. Sinning is a symptom of being broken, when we are lacking God's sanctifying grace. However sinning is not intrinsic to human nature. What do I mean by this? That we don't sin BECAUSE we're human--we sin because we lack God's sanctifying grace.
Let me give you an example of humans who lack personal sin:
1. Jesus Christ (who is fully God and fully human). Scripture says Christ was like us in every way except sin.
2. The Blessed Virgin Mary, who was conceived and born with God's sanctifying grace infused into her soul. In Luke 1:28 when the archangel Gabriel says "Hail, full of grace..." the "full of grace" is the Greek Kerecharitomene which means to possess the qualities of sanctifying grace.
3. Infants and children under the age of reason
4. The severely mentally disabled
5. ETA--all saints in Heaven
In Romans 7, the verse before Paul writes how we can not be separated from Jesus's love, he writes of his own sinful flesh. He writes how he can't control his sinful flesh. Yet he knows he is Christ's beloved.
You left out the part where Paul says that Jesus Christ's grace frees him from concupiscence. You also forget Paul's rhetorical question "Should we then sin, or sin more so that grace will abound?"
Politically, what's best for the United States is not always the Christian thing, though people tend to try and rationalize things. Politically, might makes right. The United States is the most powerful country in the world and its priority is to stay that way. That's not a Christian concern at all.
Insofar as we live in this society and vote in its leaders, Christians have a duty to resist laws, ideologies, etc. that counter both civil and moral good.
What government's duty is usually does NOT coincide with a Christian's duty.
A government's job is to enforce civil order and protect our life, liberty, and God-given rights. It does not and should not have authority over that which the Church has authority over, and that which the family has authority over. I believe government, Church, and family are three spheres of authority. I agree that governments can conflict with Christian values, and even persecute Christians, so government is not synonymous with our Faith.
PS: You quoted Leviticus earlier. Leviticus has some pretty stringent rules in there. Something about the sin of wearing two different fabrics?
I think you're confusing religious law with moral law. It seems as if you're dismissing the Old Testament teachings on the immorality of homosexuality based on Jewish religious law. This is incorrect.
Religious law governed how adherents carried out and interacted with the tenets of the faith, and with Temple ceremony.
Moral Law is eternal, revealed directly by God, and does not change, because it reveals the moral truth of what is good and what is evil.
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