Effect of Sin

"The effect of sin has been to destroy in the human heart the love of God, and substitute for it the love of unworthy things."

George Burrowes
from A Commentary on the Song of Solomon

The Essence of Sin

"The essence of sin is to fail to glorify God. Man was made to glorify God - 'Man's chief end', the Shorter Catechism tells us, 'is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever'. And, you see, if we only defined sin as the failure to do that, we would see how everybody is a sinner, and we would see how the most respectable people can sometimes be the most terrible sinners. They have never been guilty of certain particular sins - of course not, but they do not glorify God; they glorify themselves. So many people say, 'I cannot feel that I am a sinner, I have never felt it'. That is because they are thinking in terms of sins; if only they saw that sin is really just a failure to glorify God with the whole of their being all the time, they would see that they are terrible sinners."

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones
from Romans 1: The Gospel of God

Man's Rebellion Against God

"The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the centre of the universe, that he is autonomous - here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality."

Francis Schaeffer
from Escape from Reason

Take This Rule

"Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself."

Susanna Wesley