REMEMBER THE OLD children’s story? A little girl named Goldilocks is wandering in the woods and stumbles upon the home of three bears. Papa, Mama, and Baby Bear happen to be out. Goldie is hungry and tired, so she breaks in and finds three bowls of porridge sitting on the table. She tries the first. Ouch! It’s too hot. She moves on to the second. Ugh! It’s too cold. But the third is Just Right, and she gobbles it down.

There are also three beds, so she decides to take a nap. (Not the brightest move for a thief; apparently, she’s new at this.) The first bed is too hard. The second bed is too soft. The third, however, is Just Right, and soon she’s fast asleep — that is, until the door bangs open and she’s confronted with three understandably angry bears. Goldie jumps out the window and runs away.

The End.

The moral of the story? People read it differently. Don’t break into people’s houses. Don’t take things that don’t belong to you. Respect other people’s property. But note that though she commits the crimes of trespassing, breaking and entering, and theft, she gets away with it, with nothing more than a good fright and perhaps a skinned knee. Maybe the point is that a kid shouldn’t be wandering around in the forest unsupervised in the first place?

Sorry. That’s the Discipline Dad in me coming out.

Why do I mention that old fairy tale here? Because the way some researchers have drawn a lesson from the story might help us understand what the apostle John writes about sin.

IMAGINE FOR A moment that someone assigns you to do something you don’t feel comfortable doing, like speaking in front of a group for the first time. In such a situation, what’s the relationship between how much stress you feel and how well you do?

We like our comfort zones, sometimes a little too much. We may think that the best thing is to avoid stress as much as possible. We worry that our distress will incapacitate us: I’m going to get up to the mic and make a total fool out of myself. But research from over a century ago paints a different picture. We actually need a little stress to fuel our best performance. True, too much stress may cause us to stumble. But staying in our stress-free comfort zone won’t give us the motivation we need either.

This is what’s known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The relationship between stress and performance is not a straight line, with more stress predicting worse performance. Instead, it’s an upside-down U. Where performance is concerned, too little or too much stress is a bad thing. But somewhere in the middle is what some have called the “Goldilocks zone,” where the level of stress is Just Right.

So: what does this have to do with what John says about sin?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you that you need a little sin in your life.

PREVIOUSLY, WE NOTED what might sound like a contradiction in John’s teaching about sin and the Christian life. On the one hand, he teaches that Christians sin. In verse 8 of chapter 1, for example, he clearly says that people who may think they’re without sin are deceiving themselves. He follows this in verse 9 by saying we’ll be forgiven when we confess our sins. Then, at the beginning of chapter 2, he tells his readers that he doesn’t want them to sin, but if they do, Jesus will be their heavenly advocate. And everything he says in chapter 2 about not loving the world and abiding in Jesus seems to presume the possibility of doing the opposite.

But then, on the other hand, in chapter 3, he seems to say that Christians don’t sin. As the New Revised Standard translates verse 6, “No one who abides in him sins.” Well, okay, maybe John means that we won’t sin when we are actively abiding in Jesus. But then the verse continues: “no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” And then, in verse 9, John writes,

Those who have been born of God do not sin because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin because they have been born of God. (1 John 3:9, NRSVUE)

For all of us who consider ourselves “born-again Christians,” what are we to make of the statement that we “cannot sin”? That doesn’t fit my experience, and I’m betting it doesn’t fit yours. Does that mean that we’re not born again?

Translators have wrangled endlessly over these passages. Again, the New International Version handles the situation by saying that those who abide in Jesus or who have been born of God don’t keep sinning, don’t continue to sin. And that may be right; it’s a common solution to the problem.

But my point here is not to propose that there’s one and only one correct translation. It is rather to remind us that there are many places where we might encounter some tension between one biblical text and another, and that instead of trying to resolve all such tension, we might view it as helpful instead.

Here’s the question: what will motivate us to abide in Jesus?

On the one hand, we don’t want to get too comfortable when it comes to abiding. Some in John’s community, for whatever reason, seemed to believe that sin wasn’t a possibility for them anymore, and therefore behaved in ways that others found deeply troubling. Similarly, in his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul may have been writing to believers who had twisted their understanding of grace into a license to sin as much as they wanted, because God would forgive it (Rom 6:1-4).

On the other hand, we can fail to take grace seriously enough and let the fact of our sin distress and incapacitate us, make us doubt whether we have indeed been reborn. John is clear: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9), and again, we have a heavenly advocate in Jesus. Are we worried that Jesus might take a day off just when we need him?

Abiding in Jesus requires that we take sin seriously, but that we take grace seriously as well. It doesn’t help to get too comfortable, and take our abiding for granted. Nor does it help to panic, obsessing over our sin and doubting the presence of God’s grace and mercy in our lives. The motivation we need to abide in Jesus is somewhere between these extremes.

So to me, whatever we may decide about the right way to translate John’s Greek, there’s something about the inherent tension in his words that feels Just Right.