THINK BACK TO when you first thought of yourself as a Christian or a follower of Jesus. How did you understand “the gospel”? What was the “good news” — and what made it good?

We’ve probably all heard testimonies of people whose stories follow the plot line of the classic hymn, Amazing Grace: “I once was lost, but now am found / Was blind, but now I see.” Such stories often go like this: “I used to be (fill in the blank with some horrific description). My life was a mess, and I had hit bottom. Then I found Jesus (or Jesus found me)! And everything turned around. I’ve got a long way to go, of course, but I don’t know where I’d be without him.”

These are wonderful, inspiring stories about the love and grace of God. It may be your story, and if so, praise God.

Then again, your “conversion” story may be more like mine.

I didn’t grow up in the church or in a Christian family, though we would go to church occasionally to make my grandparents happy. I didn’t become a Christian until my first day of college, my first exposure to the sprawling university campus, with thousands of students going from building to building to register for classes (as sometimes was the practice in the “old days”). As I sat on a bench a bit dazed by it all, I was approached by two young men with a gospel tract who gave me the gospel in simple terms. God loves you and has a plan for you; your sin separates you from God; only Jesus can bridge that gap; pray this prayer to receive Jesus as your Savior; know and experience God’s plan. In a sense, it was a bit like a sanctified sales presentation: Do you want this? Then do this.

Being a reasonable person with no axe to grind, I prayed the prayer. There were no blinding lights, no glow of warm feelings, no sense of being relieved of a heavy burden. Just an unexpected choice and a decision that made sense (and okay, also a lack of sales resistance or the ability to say no). To use the words of 1 John, I accepted the idea that I might indeed be a sinful person who needs the blood of Jesus to have fellowship with God and with his Son. I thus acted accordingly, like someone calmly taking advantage of a good deal on fire insurance. (And yes, let it be said that even such mundane moments as these can be the work of the Holy Spirit.)

But it’s not like I had an Amazing Grace kind of story to tell. I was a nerdy kid from suburbia who never had much opportunity to get into any serious kind of trouble. And though I enjoy reading memoirs, I will never write one myself, because the story would lack the requisite drama. I wouldn’t have called myself “lost.” So what did it mean for me to accept the label of “sinful”?

And if your story is anything like mine, what does it mean right now for you?

LET’S FACE IT: as central as the notion of human sin is to the gospel, we don’t like to talk about it much. On one level, it violates the shared code of Christian “niceness” that many congregations seem to live by. More ominously, too much talk about sin can set off negative reactions in people who have been browbeaten in the church. If we were to ask the apostle John, I suspect he’d add that we don’t like to talk about sin because, well, we’re sinful, and such avoidance goes with the territory.

As we’ve seen, it’s impossible to know whether there were people in John’s community who were in fact claiming outright to be without sin. What we do know, however, is that such a claim, however we parse it, is self-deception. Again, I don’t know that anyone in the church today would have the cheek to say such a thing. But does that mean we don’t engage in any self-deception where sin is involved?

If I’m being honest, I didn’t think of myself as an inherently sinful person when I first accepted the gospel, and 50-plus years later, I still don’t tend to think of myself that way. I would rather call myself a good person, and see myself as doing good things for God and the kingdom. If I died today and there was a memorial service in a week or two, would anyone have anything bad to say? I hope not.

So what difference does it make for me to agree with God that I am a sinful man?

Let me be clear. When I question whether any of us can call ourselves “good,” that does not mean that I am suggesting the contrary, insisting that people are only bad to the bone. Human life and the Christian life are more complicated than any all-good or all-bad dichotomy.

Nor do I want the idea of our sinfulness to be watered down to the simplistic truism that “Nobody’s perfect.” Who could disagree with such a saying? And positively, it can be a way of reminding ourselves that our perfectionism can be an unrealistic and demanding taskmaster. But too often, it’s also code for, “So I messed up. Get over it” — as if to tell people not to expect so much of us.

Clearly, God expects much of us.

But always within the tension between sin and grace.

We are not worms; we are glorious beings created in God’s image. And yet, at the same time, we are broken and incomplete. We are capable of generosity, particularly with the encouragement of the Spirit; but we are also capable of great selfishness, sometimes in the very next moment. We can be humble this minute and arrogant the next; compassionate and loving in one relationship and hateful in another. Hopefully, we are always growing and maturing, always learning to be more and more like Jesus. But along the way, if we’re open to it, we will also be reminded of the ways in which our thoughts, words, and behaviors dishonor Jesus.

When we do not take our own brokenness seriously, we focus more on the brokenness of others. When we don’t admit our sin and selfishness to ourselves or to God, we don’t think of ourselves as being in need of grace. And the less we think we need grace, the less we will extend that grace to others. We are more likely to stir up strife than make peace, more likely to sow division than foster unity.

Let’s not deceive ourselves. Let us fully recognize the truth of our sin, of our need for the cross of Jesus that opens the door to fellowship with him and with the Father. And let us do so, not to condemn ourselves or each other, but to know just how amazing God’s grace truly is — a gift to be received with joy and shared with others.