Bible lessons for persons with cognitive disabilities
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Psalms 19: 12-14 part 3 "Types of sins" (© Jeff McNair)
Begin by asking people how they sat or stood or walked this past week (see Psalms 1 lesson). I tell them to hold up the card with the picture at the top that best illustrated which of the three they did this past week.
The third part (for our purposes) of Psalm 19 states the following
"Who can discern his errors? Forgive me my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins: may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgressions. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord my Rock and my Redeemer."
This is the way I started out with this lesson. There are basically two types of sins, two types of ways you might do something wrong. The first is when you do something that you didn't now was wrong. Has that ever happened to you. It happened to me all the time when I was young. My mother would say to me, "Cut that out!" which meant that I was doing something that I shouldn't do, and maybe didn't know that I wasn't supposed to do it. There are lots of things that people will do and don't know that they are doing wrong. I remember that I had some friends of mine in their first Bible study. We were talking about the 10 commandments. I told them that the 10 commandments says that you shouldn't have sex unless you are married. The guy and the girl who were friends looked at each other and said "WHOA! We didn't know!" So even something like sex can confuse a person.
But if you don't know what is right or wrong, how can you find out? Many answers will be provided. Well lets say I got mad at (fill in the blank, I chose the closest man to me). Would it be all right for me to punch him in the nose? They will respond "NO". You say, "Why not?" They might respond "Because the Bible says so." "Does it really? Where in the Bible does it say that I shouldn't punch somebody in the nose if I am angry?" I actually got a great response to that question. "The Bible says you should love your neighbor." "The Bible says you can get angry but you shouldn't sin." and so on. "Oh, so the Bible is the reason that we do the things we do. That is how I learn that something that I used to do, or something that I am still doing is wrong. The Bible tells me and I should stop punching people in the nose if I know that I am not supposed to." Provide another example of something that someone might do wrong, and where in the Bible does it tell us that we shouldn't do that thing (the 10 commandments is a good place to start if you are trying to think up things for examples).
The other type of sin is when you know that you should not do something, you know that it is wrong, but you do it anyway. Maybe you are tempted to do something wrong, and you give in to the temptation even though you know what you are doing is wrong. Lets say I was really mad at (I picked the sweetest gal in our group). So I go up to someone and say, "You know what? Christa steals stuff from the grocery store!" (Now I am confident that is not something she is tempted by, so it is totally ridiculous). So what am I doing? They all caught on right away, "You are telling a lie about Christa!" That's right, and I know it is a lie, but I got mad and told the lie anyway. That is what is called doing something wrong on purpose. I know that I am being bad and I do it anyway.
But you know, something happens when you choose to do something bad, you start to do it again, and again and again. And like the Bible passage says, the sin begins to rule over you. It is like you become addicted and can't stop doing the sin. I know people who have started using God's name to swear and now can't stop. The sin swearing is ruling over them. I know someone who has told lies so often, that he can't tell the difference between a lie and the truth. The sin of lying is ruling over him. I knew a man who got angry all the time. He was hardly ever in control of his anger. So his anger was ruling over him. That is why David asks in the Psalm, which is like a prayer, "Keep me from sins I do on purpose because they will rule over me. I will keep sinning and won't be able to stop!"
One additional comment on this. One member of our group asked, "How often will God forgive you of your sins?" Great question. I know that when I have been trapped in a sin, I got to the point where I would think, "How could God forgive me when I just keep sinning and sinning. He must be sick of me saying that I repent and then do the sin again." Well, one of my favorite writers, Watchman Nee addresses this. He says that when Satan accuses us (which is what my statement to myself is) he wants us to either admit that we are worthless and that God can have nothing to do with us, so we turn away from God, or to say, "Well, I may be bad but I am not as bad as some people." In this response, we are still looking for some righteousness of our own. Watchman Nee says our response should be, "I am a worthless sinner. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ that I am forgiven of my sin. Thanks be to God that he loves me even though I am a sinner." As Nee says, Satan gets us to look in the wrong direction. When confronted with our sin, we should look to God who loves and forgives us. So share that with your group to the degree you can.
Finally, we closed with verse 14 which we read together. It is a great prayer to remember. I think I may try to teach it to my group as a closing prayer.
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© Jeff McNair