The Root Sin: Ungodliness
The Root Sin: Ungodliness
When I talk about specific areas of acceptable sins, one comment I often hear is that pride is the root cause of all of them. While I agree that pride does play a major role in the development and expression of our subtle sins, I believe there is another sin that is even more basic, more widespread, and more apt to be the root cause of our other sins: the sin of ungodliness, of which we are all guilty to some degree.
Does that statement surprise you, or maybe even offend you? We don’t think of ourselves as ungodly. After all, we are Christians; we are not atheists or wicked people. We attend church, avoid scandalous sins, and lead respectable lives. In our minds, the ungodly folks are the ones who live truly wicked lives. How, then, can I say that we believers are all, to some extent, ungodly?
Ungodliness may be defined as living one’s everyday life with little or no thought of God, or of God’s will, or of God’s glory, or of one’s dependence on Him. You can readily see, then, that someone can lead a respectable life and still be ungodly in the sense that God is essentially irrelevant in his or her life. We rub shoulders with such people every day in the course of our ordinary activities. They may be friendly, courteous, and helpful to other people, but God is not at all in their thoughts. They may even attend church for an hour or so each week but then live the remainder of the week as if God doesn’t exist. They are not wicked people, but they are ungodly.
The sad fact is that many of us who are believers tend to live our daily lives with little or no thought of God. We may even read our Bibles and pray for a few minutes at the beginning of each day, but then we go out into the day’s activities and basically live as though God doesn’t exist. We seldom think of our dependence on God or our responsibility to Him. We might go for hours with no thought of God at all. In that sense, we are hardly different from our nice, decent, but unbelieving neighbor. God is not at all in his thoughts and is seldom in ours.
One cannot carefully read the New Testament without recognizing how far short we come in living out a biblical standard of godliness. I referred earlier to our seldom thinking of our dependence on God. In that regard, consider these words from James:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” —yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (4:13-15)
James does not condemn these people for making plans or even planning to set up a business and make a profit. What he condemns is their planning that does not acknowledge their dependence on God. We make plans all the time. In fact, we couldn’t live or accomplish the most mundane duties of life without some degree of planning. But so often we act like the people James addressed. We, too, make our plans without recognizing our utter dependence on God to carry them out. That is one expression of ungodliness.
In the same way, we seldom think of our accountability to God and our responsibility to live according to His moral will as revealed to us in Scripture. It’s not that we are living obviously sinful lives; it’s just that we seldom think about the will of God and, for the most part, are content to avoid obvious sins. Yet Paul wrote to the Colossian believers,
We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. (Colossians 1:9-10)
Notice how God-centered that prayer is. Paul wanted his hearers to be full of the knowledge of God’s will —that is, His moral will. He desired that they live lives worthy of God and fully pleasing to Him, and he prays to that end. That is God-centered praying. Paul wanted the Colossians to be godly people.
How does Paul’s prayer for the Colossians compare with our prayers for ourselves, our families, and our friends? Do our prayers reflect a concern for God’s will and God’s glory and a desire that our lives will be pleasing to God? Or are our prayers more of a do-list we present to God, asking Him to intervene in the various health and financial needs of family and friends? It is not wrong to bring these temporal needs to God. In fact, that’s one way we can acknowledge our daily dependence on Him. But if that’s all we pray about, we are merely treating God as a “divine bellhop.” Our prayers are essentially human-centered, not God-centered, and in that sense, we are ungodly to some degree.
For Paul, all of life is to be lived out in the presence of God with an eye to pleasing Him. For example, note how Paul instructed the slaves in the Colossian church (very likely a large part of the congregation) as to how to serve their masters in a godly fashion:
Obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:22-24)
His admonition to “work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (verse 23) provides us with a principle by which we are to seek to live godly lives in the context of our vocations or professions. Yet how many believers seek to live by this principle in their daily lives? Do we not approach our vocations much like our unbelieving and ungodly coworkers who work purely for themselves, their promotions, and their pay raises, with no thought of pleasing God?
For the godly person, God is the center and focal point of his or her life. Every circumstance and every activity of life, whether in the temporal or spiritual realm, is viewed through the lens of this God-centeredness; however, such a God-centeredness can be developed only in the context of an ever-growing intimate relationship with God. No one can genuinely desire to please God or glorify Him apart from such a relationship.
Sins of the tongue —such as gossip, sarcasm, and other unkind words to or about another person —cannot thrive in awareness that God hears every word we speak. The reason we sin with our tongues is due to the fact that we are to some degree ungodly. We don’t think of living every moment of our lives in the presence of an all-seeing, all-hearing God.
I believe that all our other acceptable sins can ultimately be traced to this root sin of ungodliness. To use a tree as an illustration, we can think of all our sins, big and small, growing out of the trunk of pride. I have in mind such sins as anxiety, discontent, unthankfulness, lack of self-control, impatience, anger, judgmentalism, envy, jealousy, and so forth. But that which sustains the life of the tree is the root system, in this case the root of ungodliness. It is ungodliness that ultimately gives life to our more visible sins.
If ungodly habits of thinking, then, are so commonplace with us, how can we deal with this sin? How can we become more godly in our daily lives? Paul wrote to Timothy, “Train yourself for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7). The word train comes from the athletic culture of that day and refers to the practice athletes went through daily to prepare themselves to compete in their athletic contests. It implies, among other things, commitment, consistency, and discipline.