Hook
Start with a question. Can God forgive everything?
Most of us would say yes. He’s God. He’s omnipotent. He’s love. Of course He forgives everything.
Look at what Scripture says. (Pick whichever land hardest with this congregation — extras can be trimmed.)
“Then Peter came up and said to him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.‘” (Matthew 18:21-22)
Seven wasn’t enough. Seventy times seven — four hundred and ninety. The math isn’t the point. The point is: there is no ceiling.
“I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” (Isaiah 43:25)
“As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.” (Psalm 103:12)
“You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” (Micah 7:19)
“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us.” (Ephesians 1:7-8)
Even True Father teaches it this way:
“God has already forgiven us our sins. Do you think it would be possible for God to forgive us if He still thought that we were sinners? He forgives us because He looks at us with endless compassion.” — Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (41:333, February 18, 1972)
“Among the countless people I have been leading, many have committed transgressions. I deal with them with the attitude, ‘I will forgive you one hundred times.’ This is the fatherly heart… You would forgive him, even a thousand or ten thousand times.” — Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (157:259-60, April 10, 1967)
And we sing it that way:
- “Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
- “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
- “Praise the Lord, His mercy is more.”
- “Amazing grace… saved a wretch like me.”
The picture is clear. Forgiveness is endless. Sin is something on us. God washes it off. Done.
Okay — how?
- Is there a magic eraser?
- Do we come dirty and He wipes us clean?
- Like sin is something on us, and forgiveness is the cloth that takes it off.
If that’s how it works, here’s the question that breaks the picture:
Why didn’t God just forgive Satan?
- Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden. Satan sinned in the Garden.
- Why didn’t God say I forgive everyone, we’re done — on day one?
- No fall. No flood. No exile. No cross. No two thousand years of waiting.
- He didn’t. Why not?
Same flaw, smaller scale. Why doesn’t forgiveness feel like erasure?
- You did something wrong. You confessed it. You believe God forgave you.
- The damage is still there. The person you hurt is still hurt. The pull in you is still pulling. Six months later you are back in the same place. Same pull. Same fall. Same confession.
- If forgiveness is the eraser, why does any of it keep coming back?
Two scales. One question. What kind of thing is sin, if forgiveness doesn’t erase it?
Either God can’t — which we don’t believe — or our picture of how sin and forgiveness works is wrong.
Most of us got handed some version of sin. Four common pictures. Two extremes — sin too small or sin too big. Two more refined positions in between — sin covered by grace, or sin cleansed for compatibility with God. All four share a single underlying assumption.
Picture 1 — extreme. Sin too small.
- Not really a big deal.
- God is loving. God forgives. Everybody messes up.
- Love the sinner, hate the sin.
- Don’t make a scene. It’ll get cleaned up.
Picture 2 — extreme. Sin too big.
- Sin is who you are.
- Born wrong. Every miss confirms it.
- Feel terrible. Never stop feeling terrible.
- If you feel okay about yourself, that’s a sin too.
Picture 3 — the gentle middle. Sinful nature, covered by grace.
Where most Christians actually live. Different traditions phrase it differently — total depravity, concupiscence, the old self vs. the new self — but the shape is the same.
- We’re sinners by nature. Born with a corrupted self.
- Jesus’s blood covers it.
- We still sin because the old self lingers. Sanctification is slow.
- Be honest about it. Confess often. Trust the covering.
Healthier than either extreme. Still wrong about the same thing.
Picture 4 — sin as contamination. Hell as self-exclusion.
The most recent of the four. Popular in modern preaching, in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, and in current Catholic teaching.
- It isn’t God who keeps us out of heaven — we do.
- God is so pure He cannot tolerate impurity in His presence.
- Sin is contamination caked on us. Repels God by its nature.
- Hell isn’t a place God sends us. It’s the state we make by being incompatible with His pure presence.
- Jesus’s blood cleanses the contamination. Cleansed, we become compatible. Heaven opens.
Scriptural anchors people use: “Without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil” (Habakkuk 1:13). “Nothing unclean shall enter [the New Jerusalem]” (Revelation 21:27).
Catholic Catechism §1033: hell is “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” C.S. Lewis: “The doors of hell are locked on the inside.”
Gentler than Picture 2. Locates agency in us, not in a punishing God. Has real scriptural anchors.
Same underlying flaw. Still sin as substance. Salvation still as something done to the substance — cleansing now instead of covering.
The Satan question gets sharper: if all that’s needed is purification, why didn’t God just purify Satan?
Sharper still: if sin truly repelled God, the Incarnation is impossible. The God of the Bible repeatedly draws near to sinners. The prodigal father runs while the son is still a long way off. Christ touches lepers without requiring purification first. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The principle the universe runs on is not God’s purity. It is God’s love.
(There is something true in this picture — character does make a person more or less compatible with the realm of love. Even True Father teaches it: “In the other world, if you are not equipped to conform to the atmosphere where the ideal of love is present, a repulsive reaction will come against you. Nobody needs to tell you to go to hell.” CSG 121-173. But the mechanism is character formation against love, not metaphysical contamination repelling purity. See 2026-05-15-sin-doesnt-repel-god-character-formed-against-love-does.)
All four pictures treat sin as a substance — minimizing it, maximizing it, covering it, or cleansing it. The structural assumption is the same: sin is a thing on you, salvation is a thing done to it.
All four leave the Satan question unanswered.
A fifth picture is what Scripture actually offers. It answers the questions all four earlier pictures can’t.
Scripture
King David, Psalm 51. Written after he slept with another man’s wife, got her pregnant, arranged her husband’s death.
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.” (Psalm 51:3-4)
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.” (Psalm 51:10-13)
What David does:
- Owns it specifically — my transgressions, my sin, against you.
- Doesn’t stay there. Asks for cleansing, for joy, to teach others.
- Ends not at I am a worm but I want to help others return.
- Owning the sin didn’t crush him. It freed him to ask for what actually heals.
1 John 1:8-10:
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”
Romans 8:1 — Paul’s most extensive diagnosis of human sin opens chapter 8 with:
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Luke 15:20 — Jesus on the father of a son gone as wrong as a son can go:
“And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.”
None of these minimize sin. They take it completely seriously and describe a God who runs toward the sinner.
- Picture 1 keeps the running-toward, loses the seriousness.
- Picture 2 keeps the seriousness, loses the running-toward.
- Scripture holds both. To hold both, we need a clearer picture of what sin actually is.
What sin actually is
The English word sin is the problem. It lands like a noun. A thing. A substance. Mud on a shoe — separate from the shoe, scrapable.
- Picture 1: God scrapes the mud easily.
- Picture 2: mud’s so thick you’ll never be clean.
- Picture 3: mud is covered, doesn’t have to be removed.
- Picture 4: mud must be cleansed before God can stand to be near you.
- All four arguing about a substance that in Scripture isn’t there.
The biblical words are archery words.
- Greek ἁμαρτία (hamartia) — missing the mark. Verb hamartanō, used ~170 times in the NT, simply means to miss.
- Hebrew חָטָא (chata’) — same image. Judges 20:16 describes left-handed Benjaminite slingers who could “sling stones at a hairbreadth and not miss” — same word the prophets use for sin.
What changes when sin is a missed shot, not a substance:
- The archer can’t scrape the miss off. It was their shot. Their aim. Their hands.
- No surgery removes a missed arrow from a person — there’s no off it’s sitting on.
- The next move after a miss isn’t surgery. The next move is the next shot.
Picture 1 collapses. If sin isn’t a substance, “forgiveness” isn’t God’s eraser. It’s God’s continued willingness to stand behind the archer for the next shot. More than the first picture promised, not less. But it requires the archer to acknowledge the miss — you can’t take a next shot pretending the last one didn’t go wide.
Picture 2 collapses too. If sin is what you did, not what you are, the miss doesn’t erase the archer. It describes one moment of one shot. Next shot still available. Archer still an archer. Picture 2’s shame is built on a category error — confusing the shot with the shooter.
The word for what you do after a miss:
- Hebrew teshuvah. Greek metanoia. Both mean turning.
- What an archer does between shots: re-aim.
- Not grovel. Not erase. Turn.
Grace in this picture: not a divine eraser. The patient archery instructor who stays behind the archer after the miss, helps see how the bow was angled, and is there for the next shot. Nothing detached from the archer because nothing needed to be. Archer still loved. Miss still acknowledged. Both true.
CSG / True Parents
A word from Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who we call True Father — the founder of our church. From the Cheon Seong Gyeong, the collected words of True Parents that we read together in Hoondokhae, our morning devotional. Book 7, Ch. 3. Citation (19-161, 1968.1.1) — spoken January 1, 1968.
“Christians affirm that the omniscient, omnipotent, gracious, and loving God will forgive us even if we commit sins tens of thousands of times. Then, as soon as they leave church, they start fighting. The church is not a place in which to repent after committing sin. If God is a being who can easily forgive so many sins, there is one big question: why did God not forgive the single sin that was committed by Satan in the Garden of Eden? What do you think? If there had been a way for Satan to be forgiven so easily, he would have repented. He would have repented tens of thousands of times with tears.”
— Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 7 “Lifestyle in the Realm of Heart,” Ch. 3 “Worship Service and Tradition,” §1.1, (19-161, 1968.1.1)
(Alternate / additional — this one directly engages the seventy-times-seven passage from the opening, which makes it land as a tighter callback. Pick one or use both:)
“When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, do you think he meant that we should forgive Satan? You should be clear about this question. When someone asked him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’ If Jesus, the Son of God, could forgive people to that extent, should he not also forgive Satan? Yet he cannot do that; it is impossible. When Jesus prayed for his enemies, the object of his prayers was not Satan but rather the people whom Satan invaded. Evil people are merely victims of God’s enemy; therefore he forgave them and sought for them, as God was seeking for them. Yet, this does not mean that he should forgive Satan.”
— Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (92:187, April 10, 1977). Excerpted in World Scripture II: World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon, “Forgiveness” section.
The fuller (19:161) passage and the systematic teaching it belongs to — why God can’t simply punish, forgive, or extract Satan — is developed in 2026-05-15-why-god-couldnt-just-undo-the-fall (companion sermon) and 2026-05-15-satans-leverage-over-god-is-his-own-integrity (thread). Goes deeper than this sermon needs.
True Father is asking the same question we opened with — and pressing harder.
- If sin were the substance Picture 1 imagines, God would have lifted it off Satan. Universe-problem solved in one act of erasure.
- He didn’t. Not because He couldn’t. Because that’s not what sin is.
- Satan never re-aimed. Told the woman it was God’s fault. Still tells everyone it’s someone else’s fault.
- The reason he’s not forgiven isn’t that God is harsh. It’s that he never owned what was his.
- The bow was in his own hand and he refused to admit which way he had aimed.
Sin requires the archer’s participation in the turning. No one else can re-aim your bow.
The Claim
Sin is what you did, not what you are. The biblical word means missing the mark. That one distinction is how honesty and hope finally fit together.
Four kinds of sin
Our tradition teaches four kinds. Each works differently. Each is addressed differently. Knowing the difference clears up most of the confusion we were raised with.
- Original sin — inherited through lineage from the Fall in the Garden. Root sin in the bloodline of humanity. Nothing any individual did. What we were all born into.
- Hereditary sin — the burden carried in your specific family line. Sins of your ancestors rippling forward into your circumstances, your patterns, the inherited shape of your family’s wounds.
- Collective sin — sin shared by your nation, your era, your community. What you inherit by being part of a larger body. A generation carrying the consequences of a war. A culture carrying the wounds of an injustice none of its current members caused.
- Personal sin — what you do. Your own missed shots, with your own bow, in your own direction.
Each addressed differently:
- Original sin → the Blessing. What True Father called the formula course for moving humanity out of fallen lineage into God’s lineage.
- Hereditary sin → indemnity work. Patient labor across generations resolving what was distorted in a family line.
- Collective sin → providential history. National and global scale.
- Personal sin → the person. Honest confession, teshuvah, the next shot.
Why this matters Sunday morning: most of us, when wrestling with sin, are wrestling with personal sin. Kind we did with our own hands. The other three categories — real as they are — can get used to dodge the fourth.
- Well, I’m only this way because of my family.
- Well, this is just the times we live in.
- Well, original sin made me do it.
All true at some scale. None remove the bow from your hand for the next shot.
Why this matters in our church specifically.
True Father said often that the children of Blessed couples would be “sinless.” First-gen parents heard those quotes and built hopes around them.
- “Had they not fallen, they would never have passed sin on to humankind. Their children would have been born without sin and would have grown to perfection as sinless beings.” (CSG Book 4, Ch. 1)
- “By giving birth to such sinless children, Adam and Eve would have become the true father and true mother of humankind.” (CSG, Blessed Family-319)
- “I do not know about sinful Adam and Eve, but their sinless children would have realized…” (CSG Book 8, Ch. 2, 218-230, 1991.8.19)
Read closely, the grammar is counterfactual. True Father is describing what would have been in the unfallen scenario — if Adam and Eve had not fallen, their children would have been sinless. He is not predicting behavior for Blessed couples in this one.
In popular use the line got re-grammared into a prediction: Blessed couples will produce sinless children. The cost of that misreading was real.
- For first-gen parents: when second-gen children sinned in ordinary ways — failed marriages, sexual missteps, drug use, deconversion — many felt an unbreakable promise had been broken. Some blamed themselves. Some blamed the kids. Many went silent.
- For BCs: I’m a BC; I’m not supposed to be capable of this is a heavier sentence than I’m a Christian; I shouldn’t have done that. The first locates the failure inside identity rather than action. It also flips: I’m a BC; this doesn’t really count for me; exception applies. Both moves are the same move. Both detach sin from sinner.
What the Blessing actually does:
- Addresses original sin — the lineage burden.
- Does not preempt personal sin — the missed shots that follow from being human.
- The Blessing moved the address. It did not redo the hands.
(Developed at length in 2026-05-14-blessing-moved-the-address-not-the-hands.)
The hands are still our work. And the work of the hands is what most of us came to church this morning quietly worrying about.
The two voices
Once we take personal sin seriously — once we put down Picture 1 and pick up the bow honestly — two voices show up. They sound similar. They are not the same voice.
Voice 1 — conviction (God):
You missed. Here is what happened. Here is what to aim for next time.
Always comes with a path forward.
Voice 2 — accusation:
You are a missed shot. You always have been. You always will be. There is no path forward.
The name of the second voice, in the Bible, is literally the accuser.
- Hebrew śāṭān — does not mean evil exactly, does not mean devil in the cartoon sense. Literally: accuser.
- Greek diabolos — slanderer.
- Revelation calls him “the accuser of our brethren, who accuses them day and night before God.”
- Job introduces him as a figure in God’s courtroom making accusations against a righteous man.
Practical: when you sin and a voice tells you you are this, you can’t change, God is done with you, the people you love would never forgive you, you should hide — that voice is not God. He is allowed to talk. You are not required to listen.
How to tell them apart — by where they point:
- God’s voice points forward — next shot, next turning, next conversation.
- The accuser’s voice points down — shame, hiding, the conviction that you are the miss.
Paul, same Romans chapter where he writes the most blistering descriptions of human sin in the Bible: “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Both. At the same time. Take sin seriously and refuse condemnation. Not a contradiction. The operating mode of God’s love.
Why this changes things
Confession — not throwing yourself in a heap announcing you’re worthless. The archer pointing to where the bow was angled and saying that is what I did. I see it. I am turning. Specific. Bounded. Doesn’t require crushing yourself. Requires honesty.
Repentance — not punishment. The turning between shots. The archer sets the bow down, looks at the target, looks at where the last arrow went, adjusts, lifts the bow again. Hopeful by definition. No repentance without the assumption that another shot is available.
Grace — not a divine eraser. The instructor who stays. The father who runs while the son is still far away. The bow returning to the hand after the worst miss the archer has ever taken.
Each other in this room — if sin is what you do and not what you are, someone in this church who has sinned is not someone to keep at distance. They’re an archer. We’re a community of archers. We don’t pretend the miss didn’t happen. We also don’t write the archer out of the story. We help them re-aim. They help us when our turn comes — which it will.
The accuser — when the voice shows up telling you that you are the miss, name it. That is the accuser. That is not God. God’s voice would be telling me what to aim at next. Refuse it the way you’d refuse a call from a number you don’t trust.
Living at high noon
Some members of our church started a project called High Noon. The name comes from True Father:
“When the mind and body become one, the shadow disappears. When a couple becomes one, the shadow disappears. A shadow can be cast in any of the four directions. However, at high noon, when you stand at the very center, there is no shadow.”
- At high noon, the sun is directly overhead. Nothing on you casts a shadow.
- Living at high noon = nothing hidden. No double life. No secret track. No part of you the people who love you don’t get to see.
- The project applies it to one of the places hiding does the most damage — pornography recovery, marriage enrichment, sexual integrity. Their core line: addiction is born in secrecy and dies in community.
Same teaching the archery picture makes:
- The accuser tells you to hide the miss.
- Hiding is what makes the next shot impossible — you can’t re-aim at a target you’re pretending you didn’t shoot at.
- The only way back to the bow is to stop hiding. Step into the noon sun. Let what you did be seen — by God, by yourself, by at least one trusted person.
Closing
The four pictures we inherited are old and persistent. They will not stop being preached.
- Sin is no big deal, God just forgives — said in the warm voice of well-meaning people who don’t know what they take from us by saying it.
- You are your sin, you are doomed — said in the harsh voice of well-meaning people who don’t know what they do to us by saying it.
- Sinful nature, covered by Christ’s blood — said in the steady voice of most pulpits in the Christian world.
- God’s purity can’t bear our impurity; Christ’s blood cleanses us so we can come close — said in the gentlest voice of all, in modern books and homilies, locating hell inside us.
All four wrong in the same direction. All four treat sin as a substance — minimizing it, maximizing it, covering it, or cleansing it. Sin is not a substance.
Sin is a missed shot. What you did, not what you are.
- The instructor is still behind you.
- The next shot is still available.
- The accuser is allowed to talk; you are not required to listen.
When sin comes up this week — yours or someone else’s — try the archer’s vocabulary. Not I am bad. Not everyone does this. Try: I missed the mark. That is what I did. The next shot is the next shot. See what shifts.
The God who runs toward a son still a long way off is the same God who watches us aim, watches us miss, and stays. Not because the miss didn’t matter. Because the archer always did.
Let’s pray.
Sources & Notes
Follow-up reading on the four kinds of sin and the Blessing:
- 2026-05-14-blessing-moved-the-address-not-the-hands — thread laying out the four categories of sin in our tradition, what True Father actually said about “sinless children,” and what the Blessing addresses (and doesn’t). For anyone who wants depth on the Blessing-and-personal-sin distinction.
Primary atomic notes:
- 2026-05-14-love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin-is-not-scripture — origin of the sermon’s reframe of sin.
- 2026-05-14-sin-is-missing-the-mark-not-a-substance — the archery etymology that anchors the sermon’s central image.
- 2026-04-11-satans-tactic-is-accusation — the two-voices teaching.
- 2026-04-08-blessing-loses-power-when-reduced-to-ritual — background on what the Blessing is when not reduced.
- 2026-04-11-two-sides-of-love-compassion-and-accountability — the theological frame underneath.
Scripture:
- Psalm 51:3-4, 10-13 (ESV) — David owning specifically and asking for restoration and the chance to teach others.
- 1 John 1:8-10 (ESV) — confession precedes forgiveness.
- Romans 8:1 (ESV) — no condemnation, held together with conviction.
- Luke 15:20 (ESV) — the Father runs toward the returning son while he is still a long way off.
Hook stack — “forgiveness pointing one way” (trim as needed):
- Matthew 18:21-22 (ESV) — Peter and Jesus on seventy times seven. The ceiling-less forgiveness that the rest of the opening leans against.
- Isaiah 43:25 (ESV) — God blots out transgressions for His own sake.
- Psalm 103:12 (ESV) — east from the west.
- Micah 7:19 (ESV) — sins cast into the depths of the sea.
- Ephesians 1:7-8 (ESV) — riches of grace lavished on us.
Additional True Father quotes on forgiveness (Hook + CSG section):
“God has already forgiven us our sins. Do you think it would be possible for God to forgive us if He still thought that we were sinners? He forgives us because He looks at us with endless compassion.” — Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (41:333, February 18, 1972). Excerpted in World Scripture II: World Scripture and the Teachings of Sun Myung Moon, “Forgiveness — God’s Forgiveness” section.
“Among the countless people I have been leading, many have committed transgressions. I deal with them with the attitude, ‘I will forgive you one hundred times.’ This is the fatherly heart. Suppose your own son were arrested as a robber and a murderer and was facing execution. Would you as a parent say, as you watched your son walking toward the execution chamber, ‘It is a good thing that you are about to die’? No, you would look for every possible way to win him a pardon. That is the heart of a parent. You would forgive him, even a thousand or ten thousand times.” — Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (157:259-60, April 10, 1967). Excerpted in World Scripture II, “Love — Forgiveness” section.
“When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, do you think he meant that we should forgive Satan? … If Jesus, the Son of God, could forgive people to that extent, should he not also forgive Satan? Yet he cannot do that; it is impossible. When Jesus prayed for his enemies, the object of his prayers was not Satan but rather the people whom Satan invaded.” — Rev. Sun Myung Moon, (92:187, April 10, 1977). The quote that directly mirrors the sermon’s opening structure: cites seventy-times-seven, raises the Satan question. Excerpted in World Scripture II, “Love — Forgiveness” section.
Worship lyrics referenced in Hook:
- “Whiter Than Snow” (James L. Nicholson, 1872) — “wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”
- “Nothing But the Blood” (Robert Lowry, 1876) — “what can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
- “His Mercy Is More” (Boswell / Papa, 2016) — “Praise the Lord, His mercy is more.”
- “Amazing Grace” (John Newton, 1772) — “saved a wretch like me.”
CSG quote (in full):
“Christians affirm that the omniscient, omnipotent, gracious, and loving God will forgive us even if we commit sins tens of thousands of times. Then, as soon as they leave church, they start fighting. The church is not a place in which to repent after committing sin. If God is a being who can easily forgive so many sins, there is one big question: why did God not forgive the single sin that was committed by Satan in the Garden of Eden? What do you think? If there had been a way for Satan to be forgiven so easily, he would have repented. He would have repented tens of thousands of times with tears.”
— Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 7 “Lifestyle in the Realm of Heart,” Chapter 3 “Worship Service and Tradition,” Section 1 “Proper Understanding of the Church,” §1.1 “Church integrates human character and the Word.” Speech citation: (19-161, 1968.1.1) — Vol. 19, p. 161, January 1, 1968.
Etymology references:
- Greek ἁμαρτία (hamartia) — “miss the mark” — BDAG, Strong’s G266. Verb hamartanō (G264).
- Hebrew חָטָא (chata’) — “to miss” — BDB, Strong’s H2398. See Judges 20:16 for the non-theological athletic usage.
- Hebrew שָׂטָן (śāṭān) — “adversary, accuser” — BDB, Strong’s H7854. Greek διάβολος (diabolos) — “slanderer” — BDAG, Strong’s G1228. Job 1–2, Zechariah 3:1–2, Revelation 12:10.
- Hebrew תְּשׁוּבָה (teshuvah) — “turning, return” — the standard Hebrew word for repentance, from the verb shuv (to turn).
- Greek μετάνοια (metanoia) — “turning, change of mind” — the standard New Testament word for repentance.
High Noon project:
- highnoon.org — UC member-led nonprofit on sexual integrity, pornography recovery, marriage enrichment. The “no shadows” framing is theirs, drawn from True Father.
- True Father quote on high noon / no shadows: “When the mind and body become one, the shadow disappears. When a couple becomes one, the shadow disappears. A shadow can be cast in any of the four directions. However, at high noon, when you stand at the very center, there is no shadow.”
On “love the sinner, hate the sin”:
- Closest precursor: Saint Augustine, Letter 211 (~AD 424), “with due love for the persons and hatred of the sin” — written about disciplining a wayward nun.
- Mahatma Gandhi, An Autobiography (1929), Part IV, Ch. IX.
- Charles Wesley, hymn “Equip Me for the War” (1779).
- Not found in any canonical biblical text.
Worship Set
See 2026-05-17-worship-leader-reading-honest-before-god for the worship-leader reading and song breakdown. Quick reference:
- Opening: Filled With Your Glory → Broken Vessels (Amazing Grace) → Heart of the Father (skip v.3) → Goodness Of God
- Closing: I’m So Blessed
The reading and the sermon are designed together. The reading sets the tone (Father heart, He-already-sees, the comfort that He is not waiting for a cleaner version of you). The sermon teaches the underlying picture of sin that lets that comfort actually take root.