Thinking about sin would be good for modern people, but what about Christians who have an acute awareness of sin, think about it all the time, do their best to avoid it, and yearn to be free of it? On the one hand, such Christians are in a better place spiritually than their secular contemporaries. On the other hand, Christians obsessed with sin and sin avoidance may be just as enslaved to sin as the average unconcerned, value-inverted atheist.
Sin enslaves but being possessed by the idea of sin is also enslaving and spiritually corrosive. For starters, it encourages a siege mentality and the constant instigation of trivial or false conflicts with life. In their efforts to avoid offending God, the sin-obsessed sense danger lurking around every corner and descend into a paranoid mindset convinced that every demon in existence is out to get them and them alone. Life dwindles to nothing more than rearguard action to defend one’s salvation against negligence or a momentary lapse of discipline.
Recognizing and understanding the reality of sin is indispensable; however, allowing the idea of sin to become an all-consuming motif in mortal life is spiritually corrosive. The antidote to sin is repentance because it grants the opportunity to move beyond the sin and focus on something better and higher.
Repentance is the acknowledgment that you did or thought something that was not of God — that was not aligned with Creation and God’s divine purposes. That acknowledgment lifts the enslavement to the sin. It frees the spirit to re-align with God again, and realigning with God does not entail obsessing over past or future sins.
Jesus came to save sinners, not those suffering from sin phobia. That does not grant us the right to sin with wild abandon; however, it does grant us the right to free ourselves from the corrosive pathology of sin obsession.