Read the short story and determine the factors that may contribute…

Read the short story and determine the factors that may contribute to the loss of our sense of sin and the refusal to accept responsibility for sins that we commit:

A story is told about a certain king who once visited a prison in his domain. One by one, he asked the prisoners what crimes they had committed. They all claimed that they had been wrongly accused and were victims of a miscarriage of justice. All except one, that is, who owned up to what he had done and declared that he deserved his prison sentence. The king ordered his immediate release, “For,” he said, “This man has no business here among all these innocent people” (Knox, 2011).

A sense of sin helps us understand that morality is more than just knowing the right thing to do. Being a good person means consistency in being who we are as the image and likeness of God. But we falter at times; we sin. To deny the reality of sin in our lives or society as a whole is to be unrealistic.

Indeed, we live in a world that encourages sinful indulgence with little regard for the consequences to ourselves and others. Often, however, we make excuses and do not admit that these are sinful. A sense of sin recognizes that peoples’ cruelty to their fellow humans rests in their ability to destroy, hate, and turn from the good. Examples of these that abound in our world are racism, sexism, misuse of the world’s goods, failure to help the hungry, murder, rape, and cheating are just the tip of the iceberg of the pervasive reality known as sin.