How we praise God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we belong to Christ. ⁵His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure. [Eph 1: 3, 5 NLT]
Charles B. Fleming

In our world today the average Christian sees sin as primarily a moral issue and believes Jesus came to rescue us from immorality. In this way of understanding the Gospel, Jesus is seen as primarily concerned with restoring us to holiness. And the solution is almost exclusively a matter of Jesus providing a legal justification., While God does have a concern for holiness and while immoral living is part of sin, the essence of sin is relational; it is about our unwillingness and inability to live in a loving, trusting, dependant, serving relationship with God.

The reality is that because we are made in the image of the Triune God, who is relational (see Vol 13, 2007) then we too are relational beings. We cannot escape being in relationship with someone or something. Even something that we cannot see or touch, but which is very real! Something like sin (Rom 6: 16)! So when we rejected a right relationship with God we found ourselves in a relationship/ a communion with sin (see Vol 14, 2007). Sin has changed us, for the worse. Our communion with sin has left us not only unwilling, but unable to initiate or sustain a right relationship with God.

I invite you, as you read the NT, to focus on Jesus’ saving work with this understanding of sin. Sin as a relational problem in which the people Jesus came to save are unwilling and unable to love, trust, depend on or serve God. Give that understanding more importance than the idea of sin being just immorality. Think of Jesus’ rescue mission as being more concerned with restoring a love relationship than with holiness. In other words, the Bible tells us God is love. Holiness is an expression of that love, but the primary description of God is that he is love. When we find ourselves in a love relationship with God, holy living will follow.

Why is this important? When we read the Bible the ideas we already have in mind tend to determine what we actually see. For example, if you think that sin is primarily a moral problem, then you will assume that the main concern of Jesus – as the solver of humanity’s problems – is to make us holy. Then you will tend to give greater emphasis to those scriptures that talk about morality and not give as much importance to other scriptures. That can then lead us to preach a Gospel which contains a part of the whole Gospel, but which is incomplete. If our evangelistic efforts are based on an incomplete understanding of the Gospel then our discipling efforts will also be inadequate. In that case, we might see the majority of Christians living lives that are obviously not what the Word says they should live.

What if, on the other hand, you read the Bible recognizing that humanity’s biggest problem is a relational problem, which in turn leads to an identity crisis? How will that affect what you see, how you understand some familiar scriptures? What if you saw Jesus as coming to restore the human family to its true humanity? To enable men and women to live in a loving, trusting, dependent, serving relationship with their Creator and with each other? How does that affect the way you read about Jesus in the Gospels? Here is one specific thought to keep in mind as you read:

• Since Jesus came to restore a love relationship, think of his primary work as Adopting us into God’s family (see quote from Ephesians above). Do not start with the idea of a legal justification. We can come to that later. See what difference the idea of adoption makes to how Jesus dealt with the people he met. How does Adoption affect such ideas as: his call for repentance and judgment?