Someone recently asked an acquaintance what was involved in becoming a Christian.  The man discouraged the enquirer by saying: “You wouldn’t really want to become a Christian; it’s much too difficult – you wouldn’t cope with it.”  Well, that made the man all the more determined and he ended up becoming a follower of Jesus Christ.

So was my acquaintance merely using some reverse psychology to entice the man into the Christian faith?  No!  Jesus often told people that they needed to count the cost.  Or just think of what is involved in being a Christian disciple.  I’m not an expert on the etymology of English words but it seems obvious, even to a laymen like me, that the words disciple and discipline are related.  Followers of Jesus are called His disciples and they are called to live disciplined lives.

That is never easy – in fact, it’s painful!  It is hard work.  It requires self-denial – and Jesus had a lot to say about that.  Discipleship was never meant to be a cheap and easy affair.  The devil loves to make that difficult for us and our culture encourages us to take the easy way and avoid disciplined living.  In fact our society encourages self-indulgence, whereas Jesus taught us self-denial.  We who are Christians are called to follow the beat of a different drummer, to swim against the current of our present day society – and that takes heaps of prayerful self-discipline.

Some years ago British author, Fred Furedi, wrote a thought provoking article which highlighted how our culture makes it difficult for us to live disciplined lives.  Furedi wrote about what used to be called ‘the seven deadly sins’.  They are: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.  This writer argued that, with the exception of pride, we have turned all of these sins into medical conditions.  So instead of interpreting them as sins and dealing with them as moral issues in our life we now diagnose them therapeutically as behavioural problems.

Lust is now described as sexual addiction and in this way promiscuity is given a medical label.  The author argues that we no longer speak of the ‘glutton’ who gorges himself on food, he is simply suffering from an eating disorder.  Anger has been defined as a chemical condition in the brain that produces ‘road rage’ or ‘air rage’, for which we need to undergo anger management therapy (and maybe a dose of Valium).  Avarice and envy are no longer things we can do anything about except by engaging in some ‘retail therapy’ or by spending some time behind a poker machine.  Sloth has become medicalised, in conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome and ADHD, and the solution is to back off and take it easy.  That only leaves pride!  But pride is no longer seen as a sin; on the contrary, it is now widely argued that the absence of pride is really the heart of the problem, because many personality faults are simply due to a ‘lack of self-esteem’.

In our culture, where we are used to looking for psychological excuses for bad behaviour, the idea that these could possibly be ‘sins’ will be trashed.  That’s just not politically correct.  Okay!  I have some reservations too.  May we always simplistically equate eating disorders or chronic fatigue syndrome with sin?  Life is a little more complex than that, surely?  Nevertheless Furedi makes a point: it’s not fashionable to take the seven deadly sins seriously these days – and describing them in medical terms lets us off the hook – we are not accountable.  Let’s be honest, it relieves our guilt if we can write sin off as a psychological problems.

But Furedi also highlighted that this approach dooms us to powerlessness since we then have to surrender ourselves to treatment that may never really cure us.  It is surely much more liberating to say that these are the Seven Deadly Sins that we must and can fight against and overcome.

Previous generations called these sins ‘deadly’ because they will kill us, they will exclude us from the Kingdom of God if we don’t deal with them.  That takes us to the heart of the Christian faith: the Gospel; the good news of Jesus Christ, which focuses on the suffering, the death and the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.  His total self-denial was to save us from the punishment for these deadly sins.  But by His new life in us we are also empowered to overcome them in His strength.

John Westendorp