What is sin?
Sin is everything in thought, word, and deed that goes against the will of God — a condition every person is born into, not just a list of bad actions.
“Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.”
It’s tempting to picture sin as a private ledger of specific bad deeds — lies told, tempers lost, corners cut. John’s definition is wider than that: lawlessness, a rejection of rightful authority. Underneath any specific sin is the same basic move Adam and Eve made in the garden — deciding we know better than God how our lives should go. That’s why Scripture treats sin less like a stain that needs scrubbing and more like a rebellion that needs surrendering.
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”
This is one of the most quoted lines in Scripture for a reason: it removes the exits. Whatever comparison chart people build — better than that person, worse than this one — Paul’s point is that everyone, without exception, falls short of the actual standard, which isn’t “better than average” but the glory of God himself. That standard is exactly why sin can’t be graded on a curve; the target isn’t other people, it’s perfection.
“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
Jesus’s language here is deliberately uncomfortable. Not “everyone who sins makes mistakes,” but slavery — something that controls you, not something you fully control. That matches ordinary experience more than people often admit: the habit you can’t quite break, the pattern you swore off and returned to, the way sin has a pull that willpower alone rarely defeats. Scripture’s answer to that isn’t more effort; it’s rescue.
Hard questions
How can God call what we do sin? Is it really that bad?
It’s easy to minimize sin by comparing ourselves to worse people, but Scripture measures sin against God’s holiness, not against other sinners. Something that looks small from a human vantage point — a careless word, a private grudge — is serious precisely because it’s an offense against a perfectly holy God, not just a social inconvenience. The severity isn’t about the size of the act; it’s about who it’s committed against.
If we are born as sinners, how can God hold us responsible for our sin?
Scripture holds both things together without treating them as a contradiction: we’re born with a sinful nature we didn’t choose, and we’re still genuinely responsible for what we do with it. No one forces a person to lie, resent, or indulge — a sinful nature explains why we’re drawn that way, but the choices remain our own, made willingly rather than under compulsion. That combination — inherited condition, personal responsibility — is exactly why the answer has to come from outside us rather than from simply trying harder.
Are all people who do not trust Christ really slaves to sin?
Not in the sense of always doing the worst possible thing — plenty of people who don’t trust Christ live admirable, generous lives by ordinary standards. The slavery Jesus describes is deeper: an inability to ultimately please God or free themselves from sin’s grip, no matter how much genuine good they do along the way. Slavery here isn’t about the visible behavior; it’s about who actually has the final say over a person’s direction, and Jesus’s point is that apart from him, sin does.