The Seven Deadly Sins

Sloth is not laziness, but a spiritual apathy we experience when we lose faith that God's grace is able to accomplish its goals in and through us. When we give in to sloth, we become closed off to what God is doing, supposing that we know that it is all for nothing. To counter the…

Gluttony is when we take the good gift of food and drink and make it too important in our lives. We use it to comfort ourselves instead of looking to God for comfort. Instead, we must cultivate a rhythm of feasting and fasting, where we feast to celebrate community and God's faithfulness, but also fast…

While anger can be a legitimate response to injustice, wrath is where anger is distorted. This happens when we let it linger or when our anger is motivated by ignorance or selfishness. To combat the power of wrath in our lives, we can cultivate the virtue of forgiveness. The way of forgiveness follows the example…

Greed distorts natural self-interest by elevating our desires over even the basic needs of others. For the Greedy person, this may feel nice in the short term, but it keeps them from properly relating to their community. The answer to this is the virtue of generosity, where we participate with God in his gracious giving…

Lust seems like an embarrassing but inconsequential sin. But in both the scriptures and our personal experiences, we can see that lust leads to things that are quite consequential. Lust--disordered sexual desire--causes us to objectify people for our sexual gratification. Because of this, it wildly distorts our relationships with others in ways that can have…

Envy, the second deadly sin, happens because we fix our attention on the things God gives us rather than on God and his mission in the world. As we understand our calling as Christians, we draw our significance from that rather than by comparing ourselves to others, and so we can cultivate the virtue of…

Pride seeks to build self-worth by bettering or mastering others. This is a deadly sin because it takes us out of a posture that allows us to receive God's grace, and it disrupts our ability to form the kind of mutually beneficial relationships that God desires for us to have.