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The Impact of Sin
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The world is broken. Our human relationships are regularly broken. Our sense of ourselves is often broken. Why are these things the case? They are the case because our relationship with God has been broken.
Paul puts it quite succinctly in Romans 5:12: “Sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” Humanity is broken, and the world is broken. Romans 8:20-21 tells about how our brokenness has corrupted the world: “The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice.”
We call this event in the Garden of Eden, “the Fall.” Humanity fell, and the world fell, too, as a result. As Dr. Steve Lennox puts it, “It changed us as workers. It changed work, and it changed the workplace.”
For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
Romans 8:20-21
Sin broke the central relationship with God, which altered all the other relationships. Rather than working for God, we worked for ourselves. Work came to serve our purposes rather than God’s purposes. Work sometimes became our idol instead of our service toward God.
In terms of ourselves, the self-confidence we had before fell apart. We are no longer naked and unashamed. We can become fearful. We can be lazy. We can get stressed. We can become perfectionists. Dr. Lennox shared that 94% of people feel stressed at work. 63% want to quit.
Sin contaminates our relationships with others at work. We can envy our co-workers. We can run over them as healthy competition goes amok. The fallen world is a “dog eat dog” world.
Now we think the world belongs to us rather than to God. Perhaps instead of stewards of the world, we become destroyers of it. Making a profit may supersede doing good. Who can free us from such a desperate state?