Sinfulness and Insecuritiy

This is a thought that I’ve had since I was a lot younger. As I grew older, I decided that maybe it was a little too simplistic of a view, but the more I read and learn now, the more I am convinced it’s true: the root of all sin is the lack of love.

Let me be clear. What I don’t mean when I say “love” is mushy gushy feeling love. I mean the familiar agape commitment/self-sacrifice love that always puts the other person before your own interests. The kind of love that Jesus gave on the cross and the kind of love He pursues us with today. But how does all disobedience, sin, and evil stem from a lack of that? Quite simply because we are all insecure.

Insecurity is the state of not being loved, or at least not realizing it. It is a state of fear and, outside of the love of Christ, we are all in it. I’m sure you can easily call into your mind a time when you’ve been insecure: maybe you were afraid of a grade on a test you took, maybe it was about someone’s feelings for you, or maybe you were afraid of a group’s acceptance of you. In each of these cases, assuring love and kindness one way or the other would have erased your fears. I’m not talking primarily about that kind of insecurity though. I mean to say that our entire personalities, indeed even our status as persons/spiritual beings, is one of constant insecurity.

And the insecure person constantly searches for something to assuage their insecurities. We don’t feel loved, we don’t feel accepted, we don’t feel fulfilled, so we try to find love, acceptance, forgiveness, and fulfillment in anything our feeble hearts can get their hands on. For some of you, that might look like disobeying the law, drinking, sexual immorality, or various perversions and lusts. For others who have secret sins of the heart, it might look like having control issues, being manipulative, distant, or overinvovled. And the list isn’t limited to just those. One way or another, we all try to get rid of our insecurities and fill our basic need of love through the sins of the world.

But the only thing that can fully and truly fix us and bring us love is Christ. As John reminds us, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18, ESV). Only in Christ and His love and death for us can we find true satisfaction, true joy, true love, and true fulfillment. He rids us of our fears and brings us new life and resurrection. Insecurities vanish in the arms of Jesus. Are you afraid? Run to Him.

One last thing. Why would God punish humanity for trying to seek security in the things of the world? It doesn’t seem that bad, and after all, we are all just misguided. Nothing, however, can be further from the truth. As sinners, we all chose that having the world would be better than having God. This is essentially spitting in the Creator’s face. Anything that does not give Him full glory deserves to die (because God absolutely demands and deserves our worship on the basis of Who He Is). This is the worst offense. But fortunately, out of His great grace, He has chosen to reconcile us. As the great hymn says:

O to grace how great a debtor
daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
prone to leave the God I love;
here's my heart, O take and seal it,
seal it for thy courts above.


We would do well to remember that.