If you grew up in or around Christianity, you inherited a definition of sin before you were old enough to question it. Sin was the thing that made you guilty. The thing that made you deserving of punishment. The thing that separated you from God and required someone else to pay the price on your behalf. You were told, in one form or another, that you were born broken — and that the only escape from that brokenness was belief in the right person, the right doctrine, the right transaction.
For a long time, that framing was the water I swam in. I didn’t question it because I didn’t know there was anything to question.
But somewhere in the process of deconstruction — not the kind driven by bitterness or rebellion, but the slower, more honest kind driven by a genuine desire to understand what’s actually true — I started pulling on a thread. And what I found on the other side of that thread wasn’t a reason to abandon the concept of sin. It was a reason to understand it more clearly.
This is where I’ve landed: sin isn’t a moral stain that makes you depraved. Sin is misalignment — living out of harmony with love, with God, and with your true nature. And misalignment always shows up as harm: to yourself, to others, or to the connection you were designed for.
Everything in this post is commentary on that.
The Traditional View — And What It Gets Right
Before I explain where I think the inherited framework breaks down, I want to treat it fairly. The evangelical and Reformed understanding of sin is trying to do something real. It’s trying to take human brokenness seriously — and human brokenness is serious. The world is full of harm. People hurt each other. People hurt themselves. Something is clearly off, and any honest spiritual framework has to reckon with that.
The traditional view, especially from a Calvinist or Reformed perspective, holds that humanity is totally depraved — not meaning that every person is as evil as they could possibly be, but that sin has corrupted every part of us: our mind, our will, our desires. Adam’s sin in the garden, according to this framework, introduced a condition that we all inherited. We are guilty not just for what we do, but for what we are. And because God is infinitely holy, even the smallest sin against him carries infinite weight — deserving of eternal punishment.
The solution, in this framework, is Jesus. He lived the perfect life we couldn’t live, died to absorb the punishment we deserved, and offers his righteousness to those who believe. It’s a legal transaction: his record for ours. Grace, in this telling, is God choosing not to give us what we deserve.
I want to acknowledge what this framework is reaching for. It’s reaching for the seriousness of human wrongdoing. It’s reaching for the need for transformation. It’s reaching for the reality that we cannot simply will ourselves into wholeness. Those instincts are not wrong.
But I think the framing itself produces something Yeshua spent his entire public ministry healing people out of — fear, shame, performance, and disconnection. And I think it does so because it starts from the wrong place.
What “Sin” Actually Means
Here’s where the conversation quietly shifts.
Both the Hebrew word most commonly translated as “sin” (chata) and the primary Greek equivalent used throughout the New Testament (hamartia) share the same core meaning: to miss the mark.
Not to be evil. Not to be depraved. Not to be fundamentally corrupted at the level of your nature. Simply — to miss.
The image is an archer. You were aiming somewhere. You ended up somewhere else. That’s sin. It’s a description of trajectory, not an indictment of your nature.
This single linguistic point does more work than it might seem. Because if sin means missing the mark, then the logical question becomes: missing the mark of what? And the answer, when you look at what Yeshua actually taught, is love. Alignment. Who you actually are and what you were actually designed for.
It also creates a tension with the doctrine of total depravity that I don’t think has an easy resolution. If sin means missing the mark, then total depravity — the idea that we can never hit it, that we are constitutionally incapable of alignment — would seem to make the very concept of sin incoherent. You can only miss a mark that it’s possible, in some sense, to hit. Otherwise you’re not describing failure. You’re describing nature.
And I don’t think that’s what the scriptures are actually describing.
Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 3 — The Order Matters
There’s a sequence in the biblical narrative that tends to get reversed in how we talk about it.
We talk about Genesis 3 — the fall, the garden, the origin of human brokenness — as though it establishes the baseline of who we are. But Genesis 3 is not the first word God speaks over humanity. Genesis 1 is.
And in Genesis 1, after creating humanity, God looks at what he has made and calls it very good. Not conditionally good. Not good pending performance. Very good. That’s the original declaration. That’s the design.
The Eden narrative in Genesis 3 is better understood not as the origin of human depravity, but as the origin of separation thinking — the belief that we are cut off from God, that we have to grasp and strive and earn our way back to something we’ve lost. Aaron Abke explores this compellingly in his book The Three Beliefs of the Ego: original sin, in this reading, is the belief that we are separate from God. The fall is the moment humanity forgot who it was.
If that’s true, then sin — at its deepest level — is forgetting. It’s losing the thread back to your original design. It’s the slow drift away from what you actually are toward something smaller, more fearful, more reactive.
And the path back isn’t punishment. It’s remembering.
What Yeshua Actually Taught About Sin
When you look at how Yeshua talked about sin — not Paul’s theological framework, not the later doctrinal developments of the church, but the actual words and actions recorded in the Gospels — a clear picture emerges. His framework for sin was relational, not legal.
When someone asked him how to inherit eternal life, his answer wasn’t “believe in me for the forgiveness of your sins.” It was: keep the commandments. And when pressed on which commandments, he summarized the entire law as two things — love God with everything you have, and love your neighbor as yourself. Everything else, he said, hangs on those two.
When he healed people, he often closed with the same instruction: go and sin no more. Not “go and feel bad about yourself.” Not “go and perform the right rituals.” Go, and stop living out of misalignment. Live in love. That’s what he was asking.
His brother James put it plainly: sin is knowing what is right and not doing it (James 4:17). The prophet Hosea recorded God saying that what he desires is faithful love, not sacrifice. The pattern across all of it is consistent — sin is the violation of love. It is causing harm to yourself, to others, or to your relationship with God. And love, by definition, is doing no harm.
This framing is actually more demanding than rule-following, not less. Rules can be lawyered around. You can check every box on a religious list and still cause profound harm to the people around you. Harm can’t be lawyered. Either you caused it or you didn’t.
Yeshua’s framework closes that loophole.
Sin as Disintegration — The Narrow Road Connection
In my video on the Narrow Road, I explored what Yeshua was actually warning about when he talked about the path that leads to destruction. I don’t think he was primarily talking about hell as a destination. I think he was talking about disintegration — the slow erosion of soul that happens when a person spends years living out of alignment with love.
We all know what this looks like, because we’ve either lived it or watched someone live it:
- People-pleasing yourself into resentment
- Numbing out to avoid feeling
- Hustling for worth you can’t seem to earn
- Holding onto unforgiveness until it becomes identity
- Performing spiritual things while staying completely disconnected internally
None of those behaviors appear on a traditional sin list. No one is preaching against them on Sunday morning. But every single one of them is a form of misalignment. Every single one causes harm — to your own soul, and eventually to the people around you. That’s sin, by the definition we’re working with.
The narrow road, in contrast, is the daily choice to return to alignment. To live from love rather than from fear. To let the commandments Yeshua gave — love God, love people — be the actual organizing principle of your life, not just a belief you hold. That road is narrow not because it’s exclusive, but because it requires something: presence, intention, and the willingness to be pressed and refined (tethlimmenē — the Greek word Yeshua uses, meaning pressed or refined) by the resistance you encounter along the way.
You Are Not Your Worst Moment
Here’s the part that I think matters most practically.
The traditional framework doesn’t just describe what sin is — it assigns an identity based on it. You’re not someone who has sinned. You are, at your core, a sinner. That label becomes the foundation of how you understand yourself before God.
And I think that’s where the real damage happens. Because identity drives behavior.
If you tell someone — repeatedly, from childhood, in the language of ultimate spiritual authority — that they are fundamentally depraved, wicked, deserving of wrath, that’s what they internalize. That self-concept doesn’t produce transformation. It produces shame spirals, performance religion, and the kind of fear-based obedience that has nothing to do with genuine love.
Consider Moses. He killed a man. By the logic of identity-as-sinner, that act defines him — he is a murderer. But that’s not how we remember him, and more importantly, that’s not how God used him. Moses missed the mark. Significantly, more than once. But his identity was not his worst moment. His identity was beloved, chosen, image-bearer, deliverer. And he lived into that identity.
That’s the model. Not pretending the harm didn’t happen. Not bypassing the accountability. But refusing to let the miss be the definition.
“All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) — yes. All have missed the mark. All have lived out of alignment at some point. That’s true. But that verse doesn’t say all are sinners in an ontological sense. It says all have sinned. Past action, not fixed nature.
Your identity, in the frame I’m working from, is what God declared in Genesis 1: very good. Beloved. Image-bearer. Someone who sometimes misses the mark — not someone whose nature it is to miss it. There’s a world of difference between those two things, and which one you believe shapes everything about how you move through your life.
Why This Reframe Actually Matters
This isn’t just a theological exercise. The frame you use for sin has real consequences for how you live.
The inherited framework tends to keep people in a cycle of fear, shame, and performance. You sin, you feel terrible, you confess, you try harder, you sin again. The goal becomes managing your sin count, staying on the right side of God’s ledger, making sure the transaction is still valid. A lot of people who grew up in the church aren’t living in genuine relationship with God — they’re managing a contract.
And perhaps most painfully, many people are living their entire spiritual lives out of fear of hell rather than love of God. Those are not the same motivation, and they do not produce the same fruit.
The misalignment framework moves in a different direction entirely.
First, it produces awareness. When sin is misalignment rather than rule-breaking, you start to notice it differently. You’re not just scanning your behavior against a list. You’re paying attention to where harm is showing up — in your relationships, in your inner life, in the patterns that keep repeating. That awareness is the beginning of change.
Second, it restores agency. You are not helplessly waiting for God to rescue you from your own nature. You are someone who has drifted from alignment, and you can — with intention and effort — begin returning to it. That’s not works-based salvation. That’s just taking your own participation in your life seriously.
Third, it recovers the true meaning of repentance. The Greek word metanoia doesn’t mean groveling or self-flagellation. It means a change of mind and direction. You see that you’ve been going the wrong way. You turn around. That’s it. That’s repentance. It’s available to anyone, at any moment, without a transaction.
Fourth, it actually aligns — more than people might expect — with the doctrine of sanctification that serious Christians already hold. Reformed theology teaches that genuine faith produces transformation, that a person who claims Christ but shows no evidence of growing alignment is probably not a genuine believer. That’s just another way of saying: alignment matters. The trajectory of your life matters. How you’re actually living, day to day, matters. On that point, we’re not as far apart as it might seem.
What I’m removing is the legal transaction at the center. Not because accountability doesn’t matter — it does — but because Yeshua himself didn’t make that transaction the center of his teaching. When people asked him how to be right with God, he pointed them toward love. Toward alignment. Toward the narrow road.
I’m inclined to sit with what he taught over what developed around him later.
Where Are You Out of Alignment?
I want to close the same way I close the video this post accompanies — not with a verdict, but with a question.
Where in your life are you currently out of alignment with love?
Not where have you broken a rule. Not where have you fallen short of someone else’s standard. Where is the harm showing up — to yourself, to someone around you, to your connection with God?
That’s where sin is. And the invitation isn’t to feel terrible about it. The invitation is to see it clearly, turn toward it honestly, and take one step back in the direction of alignment.
That’s repentance. That’s the narrow road. That’s what Yeshua was pointing at when he said, go and sin no more.
You’re not depraved. You’re not defined by your worst moment. You’re someone who sometimes misses the mark — and who, at any moment, can turn back toward it.
That’s the whole game.
Have thoughts on this? Drop them in the comments. I’m especially curious: where do you find yourself out of alignment right now? You don’t have to go deep — just the high-level view. I’ll share mine too.