I want to think about the dissonance which sin brings to me as a person, the cognitive and even physical effects of transgression, the holistic devastation that resisting God realises in every atom of my being. I’m considering this in the belief that my life (and possibly your life) with God can be enhanced and more fully enjoyed if I dispassionately consider the internal consequences of letting him down – if I take stock of the barrel of rats that I stand to let loose in my conscience when I sin, and how that affects my entire wellbeing as a Christian.

I want to think about sin, sinning, and my sense of self. So often my mental processing of sin is impulsive, a kind of muscle memory which, in my worst moments, reflexively rebels against the right and towards the wrong; or it is tragically retrospective, picking up the shrapnel of self-detonation. These are important issues, but they are not what I am aiming at here.

Instead, I want to think about the dissonance which sin brings to me as a person, the cognitive and even physical effects of transgression, the holistic devastation that resisting God realises in every atom of my being. I’m considering this in the belief that my life (and possibly your life) with God can be enhanced and more fully enjoyed if I dispassionately consider the internal consequences of letting him down – if I take stock of the barrel of rats that I stand to let loose in my conscience when I sin, and how that affects my entire wellbeing as a Christian.

I don’t just sin my soul: because our culture is basically dualistic, because we have imbibed a neo-gnostic approach to body and soul, it is all too easy to view my personal sin as a merelyspiritual matter, a phenomenon which is restricted to the inner workings of my heart, the unseen fibre optics of consciousness and conscience. On this model, sin is personalised, compartmentalised, and quarantined from the rest of my existence. This kind of divide means that the non-Christian world can do all in its power to seek spiritual cleansing while hedonistically destroying the body on one hand, or cleansing the body while leaving the internal life untouched. Those paradoxes sit comfortably with a world which has denied the interconnectedness of things, and which has no category with which to deal with conscience apart from via the ‘mute’ button.

As a Christian, however, I have access to a much more robust view of things. I am an integrated whole now, and I will be at the resurrection. I am body and soul with a dynamism and synergy that I can neither divide nor fully understand. This means that sin is not just inward, but that when I go against what God says, when I splice out the commands that are inconvenient, when I breach the bounds of how I am to live, when I nurse my own self-centred bias, and when I heed my self-defensive spirit, I am doing damage to all that I am.

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