The Other Man Who Never Sinned

Who is this man?  He is the 22 year old I met on a community college campus.

Sinlessness is Not Common

I was training a friend in evangelism and we sat down to talk with this guy in the cafeteria.  He was friendly enough, but fairly cool toward religion.  This would be a good tough case most likely.

After the typical college small talk we presented the Gospel and asked him what he thought.  Surprisingly, he said it didn’t really apply to him since he never sinned.  Ok, that was a response I hadn’t heard before.  Was he joking?  Being obnoxious?  Or for real?

Maybe we weren’t clear about our need for a savior from our sins, forgiveness before God, and the rest of it.  Perhaps we should return to the topic of sin and lay out the universal human condition again, and in greater detail.

No, he understood perfectly what we were stating about humanity and about Jesus Christ, the Lord.  He was serious in his protest that he was not a sinner, and not just not a heinous sinner like Hitler and his kind, but not a sinner in the least--wild!

I am thinking this guy is an idiot, so I congratulated him, “Wow, sinlessness is just not that common.  The only other guy I know who is sinless is Jesus Christ.”  He smiled in self-satisfaction.

Sometimes it Takes a Mother

It wasn’t Mother Theresa that did it, but his own mother.  He likely would have thought he was as good as Mother Theresa since he was so close to being as good as Jesus, so we skipped over her example.  

We asked him the obvious questions about the Ten Commandments and such, including Jesus’ incisive application of them in His Sermon on the Mount and other places in the Gospel accounts.  

The guy was good, and didn’t flinch but maintained his position of angelic purity, though surely he knew he was lying to us, and guilty and ashamed, perhaps that he was even enslaved to sin.

Time to go for it.  How would we break him?  His mother!  We didn’t know his family situation in the least, but bringing in one’s mother almost never fails.  

So, we asked him, “What would your mother say?  Would she testify that you never ever lied, cheated, stole, or committed anything deserving of punishment?  This time, tell us the truth.”

Cracked and Wandering

The short version is that he cracked without too much mental torture.  But, that was as far as we got with him that day.  God is gracious with us all, often bringing us to Himself in stages.  Truly, we enjoyed our 30 minute conversation with this young man.

Maybe it was a good day for him, with some new realizations about himself and what we told him about God’s righteousness and His graciousness.  It was certainly a challenging day for me and my friend trying to share the good news of eternal hope!

We spent a lot of time that afternoon discussing Romans 5:1–2 ESV “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.”  

But such things only finally make sense when sin recognition takes place first.  So take all the time necessary to thoroughly discuss this with people, and then make them own it!